Film Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (Director: David Yates)

So this is it. The beginning of the end. The start of the final chapter. It's been ten years since the first film, about 15 since the first book. And now, with these two films, it's supposed to end. So it's not as if there was no pressure. And it's only the exposition, the prologue as it were, a film whose only purpose it is to set up the grand finale, the one all these years have been leading up to. So how do director David Yates, screenwriter Steve Kloves and the all-star cast fare?

The result is a mixed bag as was to be expected. The fact that the final part was split into two films - a decision that has financial benefits but is also due to the complexity of the book and the multitude of strands that need to be picked up and resolved - allows the film to adopt a slower pace, not the frantic rush that tormented some of the earlier instalments.

And indeed, the film is much slower. There are long scenes in which the protagonists just wait. For something to do or something to happen. The inertia, the paralysis, the grim despair that has begun to grip this world, it finds its expression in these scene. However, there are others which feel rushed, which get easy endings, too easy sometimes and which have no time to breathe or develop. The sense of a rushed succession of half-finished scenes which permeates the other films - it is not completely absent here.

The film is darker, too. No more relief, no more Hogwarts anecdotes, the gloom and bleakness, the desparation and hopelessness are constant. Gone is the colourful wizarding world of the first film, grey is now the prevailing colour. The film is cast in a pale, greyish light that drains it of all colour. The dark side has taken over, the images Yates and his DP Eduardo Serra create conform.

However, there is a "but" here too. It is particular the darkest aspect of the book which receives too little attention. For J.K. Rowling depicts the new regime as a fascist repressive totalitarian society which discriminates against all deemed not conforming to the new standard of normality, aiming at enslaving those left behind. It is a great and disturbing metaphor rowling creates. Yates, however, reduces it to hardly more than a footnote, thus reducing the abyss into which we get to stare. The same can be said about the sense of complete isolation from the outside world that is so strong in the book but much reduced here.

The special effects again are great but there is little that surprises, most has been seen in this series before. The one departure is great sequence in which the Tale of the Three Brothers, a key ingredient to the story, is told using expressionisting silhouette-like animation. It is, howver a short surprising moment among too many familiar images.

Finally, the acting. Left to fend on their own without the stellar supporting cast for much of the film, the three young protagonists do fairly well. Daniel Radcliffe is still a little wooden but he has its moments as does Rupert Grint who is less goofy and gets the adolescent outbreaks pretty well. But it's up to a matured, subtle, earnest Emma Watson to carry much of it, taking the other two with her. the scene in which Harry and Hermione, left on their own in complete isolation from the outside world, start dancing. Awkwardly, incompetently, but it's a short moment of life in a world that is dying.

So, an uneven impression remains in a film that is designed to serve another. Let's hope this one, the final chapter deserves this.