Holy Crap!

Rating: 2/10 (14 May 2011)

I'm a big HP fan; I have the books and I've seen all the movies, but I think this one was the worst of the lot so far. It's one thing to make a movie out of a book, but when you have Rowling material, don't chop it up! The first two movies were good, but beginning with the third, it's like the filmmakers just weren't into it; things began going down drain from there, and each installment kept getting a little bit worse.
With DH P1 in particular, I found that no matter how loud I put my TV, it was often hard to hear the dialogue and most of the time, the music was too loud. Words were mumbled and certain lines just came out sounding wrong.
I cringed when it came to the Ministry scenes: I mean really, you'd think the way Harry's Runcorn was moving, he was dead, he was so stiff! What was David O'Hara thinking? Another thing that's annoyed me about movies three through seven is that the right dialogue is said, but the setting is wrong. They did that a bit in the first two, but it wasn't as noticeable.
Things in DH P1 jumped around a lot, it was really choppy and there was very little transitional flow. For those of us who haven't read the last book in awhile, it was quite disconcerting. And really, I think only Radcliffe, Watson and Grint should have gotten star billing on Wikipedia, because Snape's scene(s) in the final cut amounted to little more than a cameo, and yet Alan Rickman got star billing.
Overall, comparing all the movies so far, this one was the worst. When HBP came out, I almost didn't want to watch it because I was afraid of the horrors I would see. The only reason I did was because Rowling is such a great writer.
I don't know what to expect for P2 but I'm thinking it could almost be as bad as P1; they were shot at the same time after all. There really wasn't anything good about P1. I actually considered turning it off. I was really, really disappointed. I could't believe that such a good production team could pull off such horrible work. Hell, I've seen kid's stuff that was better! It really was a let down.
I don't usually like to give material of Rowling's caliber such a low ranking (2) but unfortunately, Deathly Hallows deserved it. Maybe it's because I'm a writer that I'm picky about this sort of material. We'll see what P2 is like. Cheers!