1/2

This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

According to Newtonian physics, the universe is ruled by entropy, an unfortunate principle that states that, given enough time, any system will advance from order to disorder. Obviously no one informed the folks behind the Harry Potter franchise about the laws of thermodynamics. If things are supposed to deteriorate the further along one goes, why is it that the Harry Potter movies, now on their sixth excursion, just keep getting better and better?

Lord Voldemort has risen and his minions, the Death Eaters, are wreaking havoc unchecked throughout the wizarding and muggle worlds. Back at Hogwarts school, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) can only stand by and watch as the evil forces become increasingly brazen, attempting to smash the magical gates. It isn’t much safer inside — Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon, superb as one half of one of cinema’s best master/pupil relationships) is convinced the greatest danger lies within the castle walls. Dumbledore needs Harry’s help to convince a celebrity-obsessed but reticent teacher, Potions Professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), to confess to a defining event that happened more than 20 years earlier when young Tom Riddle, the twisted boy who would grow to become the fearsome dark wizard, was his student.

For the first time in their lives, the students at Hogwarts have more to worry about than the end of the world as they know it. They have all discovered a magic of a different kind — hormones. As love blossoms and jealousy threatens to break apart longstanding friendships, one of Hogwarts’ own plots an unspeakable act of evil, one that will touch the life of every student with bitter tragedy and hasten the final showdown between good and evil.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is wickedly good. We have lived in this world for so long now and watched these characters grow into adulthood before our very eyes, that the Harry Potter universe, with all its fantastical elements, is now completely believable. When our heroes begin falling in love for the first time, we trust it because they have earned it.

In the beginning, under the direction of Chris Columbus, the films were plasticized versions of what would come later: nearly one-dimensional, overly literal and without nuance. The latter films, however, are something entirely different — necessarily darker, more epic, maturing alongside their leads and infinitely more richly textured. While we owe Columbus a debt for vanguarding the series, it was for the best that he stepped aside. With Prisoner of Azkaban (which this new film most closely resembles), Alfonso Cuarón gave the films a luxuriant medieval historicity that informed everything that was to come.

But it was David Yates, a British television director, who best grasped the spirit behind J.K. Rowling’s beloved books at their enchanting core. The helmer of the final four films, Yates is wise enough to know when to take it slow. He is a master of the operatic with a keen eye for the theatrical (a vision glowingly translated by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bruno Deldonnel and replicated in gloriously fanciful sets by production designer Stuart Craig). He is an intuitive condenser of the frequently loquacious literary material. And he is hyper-aware that we marvel not at the magic that occurs in broad brush strokes but at the enchantment that permeates the small things and makes even a fantasy universe plausible.

It’s not about the fun anymore. Oh, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is still a great time to be had, but whereas the initial Potter forays were largely whimsical with occasional intrusions of peril, these final installments are pervasively creepy and, at times, genuinely frightening. The moody Half Blood Prince builds slowly, piling on the menace. The foresight and wisdom of the casting directors who chose their child stars nearly 10 years ago becomes obvious now, not just with the leads, but with Tom Felton who portrays Harry’s school nemesis, Draco Malfoy. Felton does a marvelous job playing Malfoy with imperious malevolence, the sort of posh malice only a British actor can pull off.

In the end, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince does something very clever. Just as the rise of Voldemort threatens to steal the narrative thunder from the protagonists, the filmmakers make a bold choice to never spend any amount of time alone with the bad guys. We never even see Voldemort at all. Our perspective is always attached firmly to the leads — their impressions, their point of view — ensuring our attention is never seduced away from the more important human elements of the story. This rule is bent for only one character, Malfoy, who finds himself at a crossroads between holding on to whatever shreds of innocence he has left or fully embracing his dark side. But don’t be fooled, just because you don’t spend time with the evil doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Danger permeates everything and you should know going in that Half Blood Prince ends as a cliffhanger. The final explosive chapter (broken into two films) comes next. And if the established track record is any indication, the best is yet to come.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.