This weekend E, Amanda Nan, and I held our penultimate PotterThon – a 24hr sequential viewing of all of the Harry Potter DVDs that includes reverential silence, spirited debate, Mystery Science Theatre-style heckling, and reading passages out of the books to prove each other wrong. We followed it up with a trip to the theatre to see Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, Part 2.
(The final PotterThon will be held around Christmas when the full set emerges on Blu-Ray, and will feature considerably more champagne than one typically finds in a movie theatre.)
We all thought Harry Potter 7.2 was an immensely satisfying conclusion to the film series. It hit all of the major moments from the book, sometimes enhancing them from Rowling’s rushed read on events in the back half of Deathly Hallows. Even if it lacked a bit of heart and turned a certain pair of good guys into terrorist murderers, I still think it’s about as pitch-perfect as possible.
That’s not true for the other seven movies, as we love to hash out during the rest of PotterThon. Each of them manages to leave out a few key moments from the books.
I’m not talking about things that are best left on the cutting room floor, either for content or just not making sense on screen. Viewers were better off without SPEW, a centaur professor, Dumbledore’s unabridged life story, a Death Eater with a baby head, Voldemort’s (in)breeding, and Nearly Headless Nick’s death day. No, these are the sorts of things that actually could have improved the movies.
Here’s what we came up with…
12. Dumbledore and the Mirror of Erised
in The Sorcerer’s Stone
This one is for my wife. Very little was left out of the first two movies, but how hard would it have been to hear about the pair of thick woolen socks Dumbledore sees when he peeks into the mirror?
It seems like the silliest of details, but it’s Dumbledore who says, “The happiest man on earth would look into the mirror and see only himself, exactly how he is.” Dumbledore effectively seeing himself in the mirror is a reflection of the fact that Dumbledore has abandoned a lust for power that drove his early years. He doesn’t see himself in bed with a young Grindewald, or wielding the Deathly Hallows together to master death or bring back his sister. He just wants some cozy socks. (Wife: Assuming he’s telling the truth.)
11. The Spinning Room in the Ministry
in The Order of the Phoenix
While most of the excising at the end of Phoenix was appropriate for the big screen, the kids have a little too easy of a time getting in and out of the Prophesy Room. Adding the spinning room would have given the bookier kids a chance to shine in picking the right door on the way in, and would have made their sudden plunge into the room with the arch more sensible on the way out.
10. Hermione’s The Potions Challenge
in The Sorcerer’s Stone
The first movie hews about as close to the book as any movie can, but it still omits a few key points. Notably, we never see Hermione take on the Potions Challenge as the kids seek the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Granted, it’s a complicated challenge, and I suppose there was a danger that she would comes off as so amazing that the focus would drift from Harry. I still say we could have had a condensed version in the movie. Instead, Hermoine helps the trio through the Devil’s Snare, but that doesn’t really prove the intensity of her problem-solving powers.
9. Molly & The Boggart
in The Order of the Phoenix
Clearly book five was packed with material, which meant any extraneous piece would be scrapped. However, this moment of Molly crying over Harry’s corpse is so incredibly powerful that it boggles the mind that they didn’t find a way to fit it in to the beginning or over Christmas break.
8. The (Actual) Goblet of Fire Maze
in Goblet of Fire
The movie of Goblet of Fire spends plenty of time in the supposedly deadly final challenge of the maze, but it’s… not scary. We get vines eating Fleur and wind. Ooo. Compared to the other challenges, it’s a joke. The maze is so much more vividly depicted in the book. Yes, its slight is more than made up for by the chilling graveyard scene, but would it have killed them to throw in a blast-ended skrewt?
7. Christmas at St. Mungos
in The Order of the Phoenix
It was certainly a conscious decision to strip the Neville-as-Harry sideplot from the movies, but this scene serves a further purpose than that. We not only see Harry as a part of the Weasley family, but a glimpse at Neville’s crucio-stricken parents. Considering we instead received a limp Christmas dinner scene, this could have made it in for only a little more time.
6. Death Eater’s On Parade
in Goblet of Fire
Goblet of Fire spends a fair amount of time on the Death Eaters breaking up the Quidditch World Cup afterparty, but curiously excise their horrifying parade through the tent city. It’s extra-curious because the movie trailer included a shot from this sequence. Was it deemed too scary for kids? Certainly it was no more terrifying than the graveyard finale. I feel as though a minute or two was necessary, both to contextualize the utter panic of rumor-control the Ministry goes through, as well as to make the Death Eaters at the end a bit scarier.
5. Pettigrew’s End
in The Deathly Hallows
With no Voldemort appearance in Azkaban, Peter Pettigrew became a major villain of the series once we discover whose side Black is really on. Wortmtail is a continued presence in the movies – in a way, even moreso than the books because he’s depicted perfectly as a cross between bumbling and terrifying. Yet, he is nowhere to be found in 7.2. Considering we see both Umbridge and Bellatrix get their comeuppance in 7.1 and 7.2, surely they could have slipped this in.
4. Who Made the Marauder’s Map?
in Prisoner of Azkaban
One line of dialog could have deepened five movies worth of story! Harry repeatedly reads the inscription on the map in Azkaban – “Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs.” Yet, despite all of these characters playing into the third movie, the non-book-reading viewer never gets the dots connected. When Black exclaims “The map never lies,” he could have easily amended, “James and I made sure of it,” leaving nimble-minded viewers to connect the dots to the other pair of Marauders.
3. Neville – The Boy Who Almost Lived
in multiple books
It makes total sense why the side-plot of Neville nearly being the Boy Who Lived got cut from the movies. It’s complicated. It requires several scenes to explain. It’s inessential. Yet… without it, we lose the true resonance of Harry Potter. The whole point of the books is that destiny only goes so far, and then we make our own fate. Harry could have just as easily been the clumsy, silly, most-ignored kid in class if Neville wound up with a lightning bolt on his forehead – just like Neville could (and does) wind up as the leader of a revolution. Maybe it’s too subtle of a point for the movies, but Dumbledore could have dropped this knowledge in his big monologue at the end of Phoenix, followed up by just a minor hint by Voldemort in 7.2 when Neville confronts him.
2. Hagrid & McGonagall vs. The Ministry
in Order of the Phoenix
Perhaps my second favorite scene in all of the books is when Umbridge’s forces try to capture Hagrid while Harry and company watch in horror from their final on the Astronomy Tower. Suddenly. McGonagall streaks out onto the lawn, raining spells on the lot of them until they dispatch her (in the book we are left wondering if she lives!). This would have added a touch of urgency to the ending sequence of the fifth movie – the reason Harry’s crew hits the road for the Ministry is because they have no one left to turn to. With McGonagall still on campus, the impetus just isn’t there.
1. The Order of the Phoenix vs. The Death Eaters
in The Half Blood Prince
There are only a handful of crackling full-cast fight scenes in the novels, and this is foremost among them. It’s a terse depiction of both young and elder members of the Order of the Phoenix in pitched battle against Death Eaters in the halls of Hogwarts. It’s tense, characters are wounded, and it goes towards making the existing of the DA at Hogwarts in 7.2 a lot more credible. Alas, Half Blood Prince bungled just about everything good about the book – this included. How this got stripped in favor of the silly mid-movie attack on the Burrow (which gets repeated in the next movie) is beyond me.
Editor’s Note: For reasons unbeknownst to present day me, past me never hit publish on this post despite it being completely written. I’ve retroactively amending that state of affairs. – PM, 6/5/16