Great Final Film but Rushed

Rating: 7/10 (15 July 2011)

NO spoilers in this review. :) I caught the very first midnight showing of this movie at my local theater so there was lots of audience reaction and participation throughout the roughly two and a half hour premier. A few minutes before it started we got to see some behind the scenes snippets from other HP movies, including a screen test and with Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson reading the script together prior to filming Sorcerer's Stone.
OK, now on to my review of this film. Let me start right off the bat by saying this is my very first film review and I have read none of the HP books (gasp!). This review has nothing to do with how well it relates to the book or what they left out, changed or ruined, regarding your favorite parts of the books. I'm going strictly from the perspective of Joe Average movie viewer.
I thought Deathly Hallows Part 1 was pretty amazing and it made sense (to me anyway) and was consistent and fluid and kept me watching and very interested. I hoped Part 2 would keep that going and to a point, it does. It is very dark and gloomy and gritty, just like Part 1. I enjoyed the movie a lot but it suffers SO much from being rushed, especially the last half, during the height of the battle for Hogwarts. I get the impression the director made a checklist of things from the book or wherever of things that must be included in the movie, and jam every last one of them in there at any cost. The cost is that the film cuts from one checklist event to the next so fast that it becomes jumbled and almost seems like it's a string of random events edited together, with nothing emotionally meaningful to tie them all together. I think most of the key snapshots of events from the book are there in one form or another but in many cases there's no how or why, and that weakens the movie considerably. Without giving anything away, there were many times that I saw major characters dead and wonder if I missed something because there was no fight scene with many of them.
I really don't know how this stands up to the book but it seems like the movie is missing major continuity/transition scenes that would at least keep the casual viewer from wondering what the heck is going on here, or how'd we get here, or how'd that happen? I only hope the DVD release has about an hour of footage added back in.