HARRY POTTER – THE END
Mysteries. Revelations. Poisonings. Death. After a year of waiting, on the 15th of July Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is coming on the screens, officially opening the beginning of the end of Rowling’s saga. This is what you’ll see.
“In my life I’ve seen horrible things. You’ll see worst”, Dumbledore says gravely to Harry Potter, preparing him to the final battle. Eight years after The Philosopher’s Stone, Hogwarts is not a safe place anymore, the world is menaced by Evil and Harry is not a wizard in training anymore, but the Chosen One.
“Every day dark forces try to penetrate these walls. Once again I must ask too much of you, Harry. You must not fail”, Dumbledore says, in one of the key scenes of the HBP, the sixth movie taken out of Rowling’s saga, on the screens on the 15th of July.
But where we were left? At the announcement made on the 14th of August by Alan Horn, head of WB, saying that HBP was going to be postponed 8 months among fans’ protests, petitions and accusations. The motivations? Apparently Hollywood’s writers’ strike, but in reality WB decided to put back Harry Potter after understanding the enourmous success of the Dark Knight. The fans’ angry reactions, in the meantime, were replaced by curiosity as to what is announced to be the best of the eight chapters. “I think the public will adore HBP”, Emma Watson commented. “They will find adventure, comedy and action mingled magistrally.”
THE ORIGINS OF EVIL
“In comparison to the fifth movie” Daniel Radcliffe says, “HBP is more epic, more powerful. There is a scene that seems to be taken out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Michael Gambon and I are on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Fantastic!”
Guillermo del Toro and Night Shymalan were the first directors associated with the movie, before the production decided to point on David Yates, already at the helm of the Order of the Phoenix. Yates was confirmed also for the two Deathly Hallows movies which will come out in November 2010 and May 2011.
“This time, however, Evil will come from their world to ours” Yates says, “and Harry will have to face very difficult tasks.”
This phrase sounded like a good promo for the movie, but it transformed into a prophecy: Evil marked in actual facts HBP, since one of the actors we’ll see in the movie, Robert Knox (Marcus Belby, member of the Slug Club) was killed in a knife attck in front of a pub in London. Radcliffe was shocked, and wrote to the boy’s mother a message where he quotes a poem of DH Lawrence, “The Ship of Death”.
This is not the only link with reality, though; in the movie we’ll see the Millenium Bridge (built in 1999) blown to pieces in a scene added by the producers – a scene which will show the public that Evil is a menace for all of us, not only for Harry. In fact, the terroristic attack which took place in London on the 7th of July, 2005, is still vivid in the public’s memory.
“I can make bad things happen to people who are mean to me… I can speak to snakes too, the whisper things” a sinister child tells Dumbledore during a dialogue which will reveal the origins of Voldemort, while his shadow will extend more and more on the world of Muggles and wizards.
“Voldemort is a renegade, a rejected child” Ralph Fiennes explains, for the third time the anti-hero. “He envies Harry because he was loved by his parents, and doing some easy psychoanalysis, the love he never had is transformed into violence.”
LOVE AT HOGWARTS
Dark forces, obscure plans, poisonings, fear and tension; HBP, however, doesn’t show only the dark side of the saga. The producers wanted to give space also to the the rampaging hormones and to love.
“There’s no doubt that there’s a great desire to fall in love at Hogwarts in this chapter” David Heyman laughs. So, we’ll see Ron getting into a crush for a girl in front of a very much jealous Hermione (“I’ll go vomit” she says when she sees him kiss Lavender), while Harry won’t hesitate to use his powers to impress a girl.
“Harry, that girl is only interested in you because you’re the Chosen One”
“Yes, but I am the Chosen One,” he says grinning, while he waits for Ginny to leave Dean.
In the end it was inevitabile: when the Philosopher’s Stone came out Radcliffe was a ten-year-old child with a rather boring but cunning expression; now the former richest teenager in England (second only to Prince Harry) (note: I think the journalist here means Prince William) has doubled his age, during interviews he quotes John Keats and P.G. Wodehouse and after having acted nude in the theatrical piéce Equus he’s considered a sex symbol and a gay icon.
“I’m not sexy. Robert Pattison of Twilight is like that”, Radcliffe says humbly. “Concerning the gay icon stuff, well, for me it’s an honour.” In the meantime, during past weeks, English tabloids went wild after some photos of Radcliffe with Our Lady J – alias Jonah Speidel, well known English transsexual- appeared. “A friend, nothing more” was Radcliffe’s reply.
THE POTTER LEGACY
HBP is entrusted with the difficult task of overcoming the financial return of Order of the Phoenix (938 million dollars); in the meantime we could draw some sums, since the end is in sight with the beginning of the productin of the Deathly Hallows movies.
What became of Harry Potter, the literary invention of a jobless woman who had to sign with the initials J.K (which stand for Joanna Kathleen) her books because the editor didn’t want to let the readers understand she was a woman?
The wizard is now a pop icon, part of the collective imagination and responsible of the selling of 540 million copies of books (in the digital era), and initiating children to reading all over the world, from Obama’s daughters to Miranda’s daughters in The Devil Wears Prada.
Potter is even present in a list of enemies of Iran – iranians having accused him of being sionist – and bishop Wagner suspected the books of being satanic; nevertheless, every year the books of Rowling are like the biggest advert promoting the enrollment in English colleges.
“And now it’s almost finished, it’s weird”, Rupert Grint commented. “We had so much fun all these years and surely one day I’ll miss it. I must say something though: we’ll be finally able to do something else.”
