Welcome back to CraveOnline‘s Trolling, my dearest readers. This is a series of articles devoted to building up the things most people hate, and tearing down the things most people love. It is designed to spark thought and debate, and perhaps shake up the complacent geek status quo. A natural byproduct of this series will naturally be outrage and argument, so if you have hateful things to say, I wholly encourage you enter them into the comment section below. Be rough. I can take it.
You may feel like going on the attack when I make the following statement: Harry Potter sucks.
The final Harry Potter film was released in theaters in the Summer of 2011, and it brought to a close a decade-long international obsession with the famed boy wizard. At the time, Harry Potter knelt astride popular culture like a mighty colossus, dominating both bookstores and movie theaters with equal domination, only perhaps threatened by The Lord of the Rings as the reigning champion of all fantasy literature to date. Two years have passed, and the world’s obsession with Harry Potter has given way to a mild background buzz, a nostalgia for what was once great, and is now quickly receding into the collective unconsciousness.
I’m not going to let it go so quietly. Based largely on the Harry Potter movies, I am going to dissect and analyze, in a very general way, what Harry Potter did wrong. Starting with the boy himself.
Is Harry Potter still enchanting and wonderful? For a short while at the beginning, yes. For the first two films, I had no complaints, and found them to be dramatic and fun and dazzling. The world of Hogwarts and wizards is still a unique and enjoyable place to ponder, built on a complex and intriguing mythology, and seems like the type of place you’d want to visit or even attend for seven years. The series contains many flashes of adventure and fantasy that captured the world like no other fantasy novel. Eventually, though, the Harry Potter series climbed up its own ass and set up camp.
Until next week, let the hate mail flow.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and co-star of The Trailer Hitch. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind. If you want to buy him a gift (and I know you do), you can visit his Amazon Wish List.
Trolling Harry Potter
-
Harry Potter is a Murderer
Think of Harry Potter's story arc. He starts his saga as a put-upon 11-year-old boy who learns he is has magical powers, and was unexpectedly enrolled in a complex and dazzling school for wizards and witches. While at school, he learns that his parents were murdered by a wicked classmate of theirs, and it's up to Harry (tracing shades of Hamlet) to avenge their deaths. As the books and the movies progress, they get increasingly dark and turgid, characters die, and everyone mobilized for a great war with the evil classmate in question. So the whole point of the story is to watch a sweet-hearted 11-year-old boy be whisked into an enchanting world, only to be primed for combat, to feel hate and fear, to watch loved ones die, and to ultimately commit murder at age 17. This is not fun or magical or dramatic. It's just dark and sad.
Harry is no hero. Hogwarts is no school. Harry is a brainwashed soldier who was intentionally psychologically damaged by his bootcamp. He may be depicted as heroic, but one can easily see the parallel between Harry and Gomer Pyle from Full Metal Jacket.
-
Voldemort is a Bad Villain
If our hero doesn't quite cut the mustard, maybe the villain of the Harry Potter world can pick up the slack. Sadly, Voldemort doesn't really have much to add to the proceedings either. Let's take a look at his arc. He was found to be an immensely powerful young lad who was rescued from the Muggle world by Dumbledore, only to eventually flip out and go on a genocidal spree that is never fully explained (at least not in the movies). Along the way, Voldemort picked up hundreds of disciples who would obey his every command.
Why do people follow this guy? He's a slimy, pale, clearly evil noseless crackpot. He has no charisma, no philosophy to sell, and only seems to rule his minions with threats of violence and death. We are never really given Voldemort's motivations. He's just a bad egg from the start. Yawn. Bad eggs are not rich or complex, and certainly cannot lend any texture to what is supposed to be the central conflict in the entire Harry Potter film series.
-
What the Heck is the Function of Hogwarts?
Harry is a wizard, and goes to a wizarding school, which lies hidden in the remote hills of England. He goes there to hone his wizarding skills. He learns to mix magical potions, cast spells, and ride around on broomsticks. This is all very neat and fun and adventurous. But I can't help but wonder: What exactly does a diploma from Hogwarts offer a young wizard? The only other adult wizards in this universe are either shop owners or teachers. Some work for an ill-defined Ministry of Magic, whose function isn't too clear either. Are those the only choices of employment once you graduate? Why is it important to be a powerful wizard if you're just going to work either as a retail wonk or a government clerk? If that's all Harry has to look forward to, doesn't his arc seem churlish?
Some of the wizards have no working knowledge of the “normal” world. Hogwarts, then, is painfully backward in their curriculum. Sure, there's plenty of magic to learn, meaning classes in the sciences may seem a bit unnecessary, but where is the literature? The music? The sex ed? The three R's? Do any of these kids ever do a single math problem? I feel bad for English kids who never get to read Shakespeare or Dickens. You learn to move things with your mind, but you never get to read David Copperfield. That's a bad school.
-
About Half the Movies are Just Bad
The films based on the Harry Potter novels begin strong, and then take a dive somewhere around film #3. The fourth is pretty good, actually, but the fifth through the eighth are, well, convoluted and badly filmed. The movies are perhaps the worst kind of literary adaptation, i.e.: they rely less on telling the story in a fresh way, and more on merely depicting what has already been fleshed out on the page.
This means that the movies are not adaptations, but mere dramatizations of key plot elements from the books. The pace is too quick, the tone too dark, and the story too complex for most of the movies to work as actual dramas. Important stuff and unimportant stuff whizzes by without any sense of majesty or portent. The filmmakers were so hellbent on including every detail from the books, that they had to expand the seven-book series into an eight-film extravaganza. This is not how you adapt literature to the screen. You have to have a sense as to what makes a good film. The motivations have to be explained, and, yes, the story needs to be shortened and altered to fit into the 90-to-150-minute time limit. This is a series of films that tried to do everything at once, and came across as a narrative traffic jam.
