I am a Harry Potter fan. I've read all the books and seen all the movies. In fact, it was Harry Potter that got me into reading in the first place by showing me that books can completely take you into a new and fantastic world, and teach you a few things on the journey. That said, I hadn't read the seventh book in a long time, and certainly not right before the movies came out. I remembered enough to know what happened but not the minute details that people tend to get caught up in. And now, I feel like I've started to learn the difficulties of translating a book to a movie when they are such different mediums. (If anything proves that I am of this opinion it will be that Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite of the movies.) In many cases, changes need to be made to make a book work for the screen, and one can't expect everything from the book to make it. In that respect, I think that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 was extremely well done. More so than most of the other Harry Potter movies.
What Deathly Hallows does so well is create an atmosphere of dark uneasiness, and a constant sense of drawing towards an end. Everything is gray and dark. Hogwarts no longer seems a magical place. In fact, the movie is a stark contrast to the first movie where everything about the wizarding world seemed magical. Now it is a weary and war torn place, the life having been sucked out of it by Voldemort.
Part 2 is better than Part 1 and most of the other movies in that it gets to the point quickly, which is a great benefit of there being two parts to Deathly Hallows. The action starts up from the beginning, with the breaking into Bellatrix's vault to get a horcrux, and then leading into the war building at Hogwarts castle, which resembles of refugee camp more than a school.
And the actors all do pretty good work as well, but the most impressive, despite not having enough screen time, perhaps, is Alan Rickman as Snape. Snape has the most interesting story of anyone in Deathly Hallows aside from Voldemort, Harry, and Dumbledore, and it is a terribly tragic one. Rickman portrays Snape with the perfect balance of the harsh man Harry sees him as and a man who could love Lily Potter so much that he would swear to protect her son despite his hatred of Lily's husband, and despite the danger involved in doing so. The Snape scenes were the best to watch, by far.
The intensity of the movie was mostly constant and came out strongly during many of the fighting scenes. There is also the matter of Snape's death scene, handled in the most brutal way possible, which was actually a good move. It was harsh and intense and didn't hold back. And that is what made it stand out among the many deaths.
Certain scenes were awkward or felt unnecessary, and some were overdramatic, such as the Elder Wand flying in slow-motion towards Harry's hand. But these moments, found in pretty much all of the Harry Potter films in order to make everything more intense, did not stand out so much as to ruin the rest of the film. For the most part Deathly Hallows Part 2 was entertaining for the full time, and even heartbreaking in places. And not just because it was the last story in the series, but because the film actually managed to show the tragedy of certain characters as a result of the war between Voldemort and Harry, in and of itself. Rather like the book did. And what matters is that the movie kept the spirit of the book and told the story well in the best way that it could be told on screen.
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