Let down!

Rating: 6/10 (28 July 2011)

Let me start off by saying I am a fan of both the books and movies, so I am not a troll.
I went into this movie with high expectations. I was expecting this movie to be great and considering this was the end I expected the filmmakers to go all out. This was, after all, what the trailers promised. They promised an action packed finally. Unfortunately the movie failed to deliver in almost every way.
Leading up to the release of the film all anyone could talk about was the action and battle scenes in the movie. Supposedly the battle took up over 45 minutes of the movie?! This was not the case. The battle scenes we see are brief. In fact they make up maybe 5 minutes of the movie. The entire first 45 minutes is a big build up to the battle and we do not see any of it pretty much. Instead the movie decides to focus almost entirely on Harry, Ron and Hermione's quest to destroy the remaining horcruxes. This takes up the majority of the movie. It's like DH:P1 only they changed locations to Hogwarts and there is an epic battle happening around them.
Had the hype surrounding the battle not been so great the fact that the movie is not an action movie would not have bothered me. Instead that was all anyone could talk about and I naturally was expecting and looking forward to it. I wanted to see more fights like the one between Voldemort and Dumbledore at the end of OOTP. We do not see anything like that. There are three cool scenes, when Kingsley Shacklebolt stop time and kills a death eater, when Aberforth Dumbledore protects students from dementors by casting a huge patronus spell and when Molly Weasley kills Bellatrix. Other than that most of the fighting consists primarily of flashes and loud noises, nothing else.
The battle between Harry and Voldemort also made up a good chunk of time, but nothing really cool is done. If you have seen GOF then you have pretty much seen the extent of the fight between Harry and Voldemort. They do the same light connection thing they did in that movie and then they show Voldemort beating Harry up and Harry apparrating with Voldemort. The fight was a major let down. When Voldemort dies it is not epic. You won't clap, you won't do anything because he just kind of dies and that's it.
This movie also was not as emotional as I thought it would be. Considering the deaths in this movie and considering that it's the end I felt it should be the most emotional of them all. Instead we only see the dead bodies of some of our most beloved characters, we don't see them die and there is no build up to it. Any emotional response was muted by doing it this way.
There are a handful of things they got right in this movie. First and foremost was Snape's memory. I felt they did that part justice.
I also liked during the Harry-Voldemort fight how they cut back and forth between the fight and Ron and Hermione trying to destroy Nagini. That was more intense and suspenseful than the fight between Harry and Voldemort.
The acting was great in the movie. All the actors did a great job, specifically Alan Rickman, who went all out as Snape.
The effects, for the most part, were great.
Overall this movie was a massive let down. For whatever reason the filmmakers felt they didn't have enough time to do more with this movie. Despite the fact this movie is the shortest of them all, clocking in at 2 hours. They easily could have added an extra 20-30 minutes to include more action, to make the deaths more emotional and to make the fight between Harry and Voldemort better.