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Film

Review: Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince

The magic wanes as the mood darkens

July 16, 2009 13:46
Alan Rickman as Snape: the film comes alive whenever he is on screen

ByJonathan Foreman, Jonathan Foreman

3 min read

Today’s children and teenagers have greater powers of concentration than is generally realised. How else can you explain the extraordinary success of the Harry Potter phenomenon, especially the films? After all, the screen adaptations are rather slow-moving and talky, especially compared to other blockbusters. Indeed, apart from the special effects, it is hard to believe that, compared to the Transformers franchise, the Potter films and products are of the same era.

The Potter phenomenon also seems to indicate that millions of film-going children have deeply traditional tastes. Kids everywhere, from urban ghettoes to South Asian villages, are entranced by J K Rowling’s vision of a boarding school steeped in history, hierarchy and formal ceremony, even though it represents the antithesis of “progressive” educational ideology.

For that matter, just about every value celebrated by the books and films is the opposite of those considered culturally correct by today’s “right-on” baby-boomer establishment. It may be no coincidence that the magical world, with Hogwarts at the centre, is a place where the very old and very young happily co-exist, without much interference by parents or indeed by anyone of middle age.

Certainly the wizard world is an luxuriantly Victorian or Edwardian one. It is not just the school with its gothic towers, stone staircases and great Oxbridge style hall; it is the steam locomotives pulling lovely old-fashioned Pullman cars with proper carriages, the Dickensian shops of Diagon Alley, the libraries with leather-bound volumes instead of computers, and the elegant brass alchemical instruments. Being transported to it on the Hogwarts express as it puffs through the Highlands is one of the real pleasures of the Potter films.