As surprising as it must seem, the Harry Potterharry potter reviews series has found its savior in director David Yates.  It’s surprising for a number of reasons actually, but the two that stand out most are that he seems to have come from more or less nowhere (especially considering the names attached to other film in the franchise), and that his first shot, Harry Potter and the Order of the PhoenixPhoenix reviews was arguably the worst effort the series had seen.

That’s a bit of a hill to climb.  Yates, attached to the final four films in a series that jumped directors for a while, does something with Half-Blood Prince that no one else managed to this point, or perhaps more accurately doesn’t do something… he doesn’t resign himself to his fate.  Half-Blood Prince is the first film in the series that seemed to rather pointedly suggest, “Look. These books just aren’t that good.”

It isn’t as “magical” as the first movie, and isn’t as visually compelling as the franchise’s (now) second-best work Prisoner of Azkaban, but it is far and away the most movie movie.  It screams out, in the somewhat subdued way that is all that is perhaps possible given the shackles, against itself and shoves in its own ideas where it can.  These are our constraints, the films says, but let’s go somewhere with this thing.  The story is decent enough, I suppose, but the storytelling is not a game worth playing.  Potter is growing up, and we’ve been on this road for a decade… let’s grow the whole damn thing up.

Half-Blood Prince finds Harry at the beginning of another year at Hogwart’s.  It’s a dark and determined time, and gone are most of the trappings of a magical world for the sake of making things look magical.  In the beginning things looked flash, because it was all new to Harry, but the world of magic just looks normal to those inside, and there aren’t moans of wonder whenever you turn around.

Harry sits in a subway greasy spoon fidgeting among the Muggles, and mentions liking riding on trains.  We get the impression that, like the Weasley father, he finds the normal world rather interesting at this point.  He reads a wizard newspaper that at once reports that Draco Malfoy’s father has been locked up in Azkaban, and poses the question, “Is Harry Potter the chosen one?”  We’ve got our tone set.

We roll along pretty quickly through some of the major points that must be brought to the foreground.  Severus Snape makes a pact to protect Draco Malfoy, and Malfoy is apparently the chosen instrument of some serious nefariousness.  Returning Professor Slughorn holds the key to something we need to know about Voldemort, and Dumbledore wants Harry to get it out of him.

Even in the earliest stages, Yates is changing up the game here.  He abandons Snape for one thing.  We all know where things are going, and even though Harry is locked into his viewpoint by the source, we don’t need to dance around each other.  If you don’t know already, well… we might as well just tell you, because it’s a more interesting story anyway.

Malfoy is similarly stripped of silly nogoodnikness, and thrown into a far more intersting and palatable counter to Harry.  Malfoy is also struggling with the idea of being a “chosen one,” and the two are equally, apparently, locked into their roles by bitchy circumstance.  I was born here.  I was raised thus.  These things happened to me.  What would you do?

It gets to everyone to some degree.  Dumbledore is much less typical father-figure, and a lot more bad ass wizard father-figure.  Hermione is a lot less snotty know-it-all, and a lot more “strong by fighting her lineage.”  Everyone is significantly different this go around.  They are all a lot less caricature, and a lot more character.

Meanwhile, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are making their way through something that is approximately High School’s senior year.  Whatever your plots, problems, or status, High School will have its way with you somehow, and you probably won’t be happy about it.  When a Dark Lord is afoot and people are nearly killed it might distract you a bit, but probably not for long.  As we might expect, much of the movie is spent watching people not kiss each other, or kissing the wrong person, or fidgeting mercilessly, or lost in the depths of despair.

In the end, Yates’ greatest achievement is the simple fact that the movie is in some sense rather boring.  The Weasley twins’ store stands out as something of a display, because it actually is new and rather bursting with magic.  The rest is just another normal day in magic town.

All that comes before (book or film) is working the viewpoint of talking about magic (WOWWow reviews!!) with a story that is mostly just an excuse, and characters who are largely just whoever happens to be around.  Half-Blood Prince is an intriguing story, told well, with characters you can hold, that just happens to take place where there’s some magic around.  Everyone and everything has grown up, and the film moves solidly into the realm of that which can be appreciated, as opposed to that which is spat out and looks quite shiny in order to milk fans of a craze.  It isn’t because that’s what happens in the book.

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