The fanboys (and girls) will likely be satisfied, and those others of us who trudged through the rest of the movies will find it a more entertaining and quicker-paced conclusion (certainly compared with the insufferably slow Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), and the interminably boring Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)).  Things come to an end, but because I didn’t much care about the characters, it really wasn’t very dramatic or triumphant or even sad.  Truth be told, I did feel a twinge of regret that the vast resources of money and filmic talent could not have been put toward adapting more worthy material!

I blame the books.  I grew up an avid fantasy and sci fi reader and have been able to slog my way through all sorts of B- and C- grade trash, but JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series draws the dubious distinction of being one of only two series which I abandoned halfway through, at about book 5.  The pacing just got too bogged down, the characters got too one-dimensional, interchangeable, unappealing and angsty, and the writing was just too bloated, as if Bloomsbury instructed the editors simply to do a once over with a spell-checker (do not pass go, do not try to do any real editing), then rush the book out to the printers, sit back and watch the cash register ring itself into a frenzy.  I found myself not particularly invested in whether Harry lived or died in 2 books’ time, or whether he defeated Voldemort or not, and at that point you could say Rowling had lost me.  (In case you were interested so you know to avoid it, the other series was Terry Goodkind’s horrendously hammy and politically preachy Sword of Truth/ Richard and Kahlan series, though the Legend of the Seeker TV series adaptation was unexpectedly watchable – albeit lowbrow – fare.)

For me, the only fun part of getting to the end of the story was deconstructing how JK Rowling’s writing process, and divining which plot elements she had planned from the start, versus made up as she went.  Anyone who’s watched JJ Abrams’ Lost (2004-10) or Ronald D Moore’s Battlestar Galactica (The Reimaigined Series) (2004-9) knows what I mean.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

In the category of “surely she made this sh*t up as she went” are the plot devices that only turned up in the last 1-2 books.  Seven horcruxes, anyone?  I felt like I was watching a low-grade Japanese RPG where the final, climactic showdown with the evil villain involved running around delivering mail to seven random characters.  I could think of no other reason to introduce horcruxes than to pad out the books.  And what’s with Dumbledore’s brother?  He could have been excised from the story entirely.  At least in Star Wars (The Original Trilogy), Lucas had introduced Leia to us already in Episode 4, so when he decided she was Luke’s sister by Episode 6, the revelation was not completely out of left field (though it was still laughably ridiculous)

On the other hand, it seems that Snape’s story arc was something Rowling had been setting up for several books, if not from the beginning, at least earlier than when she pulled horcruxes out of her backside.  I found it more compelling than Harry, Ron or Hermione’s stories.  And you could foresee Harry’s messianic sacrificial ‘death’ from book 1 … however Rowling didn’t really pull that off very dramatically, likely because she was trying to cram so many other clichés into the climax.  In particular, his ‘death’ ended up just another puzzle to solve to get at the 6th horcrux (out of 7).  But as all writers have known from ancient times (The Myth of Osiris and Isis (2494-2345 BC), The Epic of Gilgamesh (2150-2000 BC), and the New Testament (50-150 AD)), if you’re going to make your protagonist go through death and rebirth, you should set it up as the main event, and invest it with emotional and moral power.  Maybe Rowling was being contrarian, because Harry’s ‘death’ seemed a bit of a parlor trick by comparison, and instead of topping it with something grand for the final victory over Voldemort, it comes down to a miscalculation about which wizard disarmed whom in which order at some point earlier in the books.  Sort of like Luke beating Darth Vader because he forgot to recharge his lightsaber that morning.

Underwhelming.