Such an epic disappointment.

Rating: 6/10 (17 July 2011)

It actually took me years to watch the first 3 Harry Potter movies, which I considered to be aimed straight at kids. Once I did, I really found myself enjoying them (especially Prisoner of Azkaban, IMHO the best of the series), so I decided to get the books.
I've read them twice since them, and found them entertaining - and I thought the first three movies were very faithful to them, given the time constraints.
It all seemed to change with Order of The Phoenix, though. While the earlier movies felt like a story being told, OOP was more like a bunch of disjointed scenes that the viewer had to assemble into a plot. I thought The Half Blood Prince was the worst - from talking with friends, it was obvious there was so much stuff thrown out from the books some things didn't make any sense at all (as if, who cared who The Half Blood Prince was - the movie never made it obvious).
Enter the epic finale. Once I finished reading the last HP book, I was pretty surprised J.K. Rowling actually made simply the best ending I could ever think of, and wondered how it'd look on the big screen. One word: terrible. Director David Yates should have been fired a long time ago (after Half Blood Prince) - and the Deathly Hallows suffers under his helm. It's completely disjointed - even though he had two movies to tell the story, the MAJOR plot points are missing: the real Albus Dumbledore life story, Kreacher's conversion, Snape's story, Harry's decision to seek the Horcruxes instead of the Hallows, the real way Harry defeated Voldemort, the sacrifices some of the characters went through (and the deaths of some major ones) - it's all gone or severely cut, and it was replaced by tons of CGI and lame one-liners.
I suppose WB thought they'd rather go for epic fights, instead of telling the entire story as it was meant to be told, fearing people would not understand it. Sad.
I have to wonder whether people who didn't read the books understand where the mirror came from, why Dumbledore's brother was still angry at him, why Neville killed Nagini when only Ron and Hermione knew they had to, and why Dumbledore used Harry the way he did. I guess not.