Book-Movie Comparison: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Like The Order of the Phoenix, The Half-Blood Prince does a little adaptation tug-of-war.  There are parts of it that are just excellent (places where, speaking as someone who’s not overly crazy about the book, I feel it improves on the source material a little,) but other parts really drop the ball.  As such, while it has some really strong things going for it, it’s hard to give it the full stamp of approval (spoilers.)

We’ll start with what I like.  As usual, casting is spot-on, and Jim Broadbent is just inspired as Slughorn.  And beyond his performance, I really like what the film does with the character.  They maintain the core of who Slughorn is, absolutely, with his “collection” of future stars among the student body, but they also show how that’s a little pathetic and in places even bring a small amount of pathos to the character.  The monologue he gives about his fish is absolutely lovely.

Draco’s whole plot is really well-done too.  It’s fun watching the young actors grow into their skills over the years (some more so than others, of course,) and looking back on The Sorcerer’s Stone, I wouldn’t have thought Tom Felton would be as genuinely excellent as he is here.

This is the one movie in which a good chunk of the teen romance stuff works for me, even though, as I said, it gets super tiresome in the book.  This is mostly down to Lavender and Cormac and how much fun they are:  between Cormac’s pompousness and Lavender just giving it her all, both of them entertain in every scene they’re in.  And let’s be real – every scene of someone under the influence of a potion is awesome.  The Felix Felicis scene is especially great.  As dark as this story gets, it needs these moments of pure delight.

Where the movie chiefly missteps is, oddly enough, in its two main plots.  Harry and Dumbledore’s study of Voldemort’s past is barely there – the majority of the memories are cut out altogether, and the few that remain lack most of the commentary to show their relevance.  While we do hit the absolute highlights of introducing Horcruxes, there’s so much missing about Dumbledore’s speculation/reasoning as to what the Horcruxes are that the knowledge is basically pointless.  It’s an instance where it doesn’t hurt this film as much as it does the next one; it makes no sense how the trio even begin to start looking for the Horcruxes in The Deathly Hallows, which was tenuous enough in the book.

The Half-Blood Prince plot also loses quite a bit.  Again, the bones of the storyline are there, and there are individual scenes that are really well done – the sectumsepra scene is wonderfully-realized – but on the whole, it feels like an afterthought in a movie that’s named after it, which is weird.

Finally, Tonks and Lupin?  If they were gonna reduce it to literally one line in the whole movie, I don’t know why they bothered.  Seriously, what was the point?