Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Review

Well, i won tickets to a pre-screening and boy was i impressed with how they handled this latest in the Potter series of movies. Being a Potter fanatic myself (having followed the stories for 10 years now) my view was not hampered by ever comparing it to the book.
However, they did a brilliant adaptation.

The story pretty much follows through with the book and moves at a good pace throughout. In the beginning though, they were taking lines straight from the book and this began to worry me as they do not translate directly to film, however, when the trio arrive back at Hogwarts for their 6th year this straight-from-the-book nonsense was fixed and i quite enjoyed myself for the whole movie.

To counteract the immensely dark overtones of the book, the filmmakers coupled the main story with the romantic sub-plots, however these do not overshadow the main plot and the balance is almost perfect enough to keep the story flowing.

My only single discrepancy with the movie lies in how they dealt with the character of Ron. In the book Ron's character goes from being an oblivious dunderhead to a reasonable person with the advent of a certain incident of which we will not speak :P however in the book, Ron's character felt like it was only used to aid the comic-relief plots within the movie and he never really gets involved with the rest of the story.

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING!!!! (not that anyone doesn't already know it)
Actually i did have one other discepancy, though this may only be due to my film making style). I did not like how the editing of Dumbledore's death went. When Snape goes to kill Dumbledore,there is no music and I would have thought that a lack of music would help bring out the emotion of the event, however as Dumbledore falls (of which there is only a brief shot) they pipe up the really long notes on strings in minor chords a cop out if you ask me!

All in all though I was really impressed with this movie and think it was well adapted, I can now add it to the very small list of decent movies of 2009

8 and a half/10 - Brilliant adaptation, but some minor character flaws.

Transformers 2...all the action, but no soul.

Do not get me wrong here, I loved the action sequences in Michael Bay's follow up to his surprise hit of 2007. However, this film lacked the soul of the first one...let me explain.

The first movie had in it very realistic and funny dialogue moments ("Sam's happy time") which are missing from the new one. The characters also came across two dimensional, owing to the missing dialogue and a lack of a journey for them to take. And Isobel Lucas... an absolutely pointless character, i don't even know why she was in it (Megan Fox was enough eye candy :P) It seemed that this movie lacked that extra bit to make it as good as/ better than the first one.

The effects however were unbelievable, and props to the effects houses (who were robbed by the slaughtering of the golden compass for the effects Oscar in 2007). TRIVIA: for the 5 imax scenes it took 5 days of rendering for 1 frame!!!.

Other than the effects this movie kind of blows (the Proposal was better!) but i think it is due to: A; Script problems and story Problems and B; Michael Bay letting the success of Transformers 1 get to his head.

5/10 - it still kept me reasonably entertained.