harry potter and the half blood prince

I have to confess, I wasn't a particularly big fan of the last couple of harry potter films.

I liked the first couple, when they were (for want of a better phrase) "kid-focused", but the last couple were in some sort of weird half-way house between being kids films and something a bit more grown up. Also, there seemed to be something akin to "plot extension" going on.

By that, I mean that it felt like we were being drip-fed stuff at too slow a rate. So where the first couple of films had only small elements of the "Voldermort" stuff and that worked fine, because the focus was on Harry being a kid and learning magic, by the later films the tendency to only give us very small bits of information was becoming rather annoying.

Especially since what was happening as the main plots wasn't actually all that interesting. And to some extent that's also true in the half-blood prince. I mean, given the whole thing is called the half-blood prince, you'd think it would be a central point to the film. But it isn't - it's quite a small part.

However, this time, there's the first stirring of romantic feelings among Harry and his friends and that really helps to lift the films. Now that there are more interesting inter-personal relationships, there's more of a feel of reality and a grounding in character than in the last couple of films.

It feels like we've emerged from a sort of not-quite children, not-quite teenage wilderness.

And to help out further, this film really starts to tell us stuff about the bad guy, Voldermort. Where previously he was a fairly non-descript shadowy figure, we finally start to get some proper information on his background and past.

Also, tonally, the film feels darker and more desperate than the previous films. You really get a sense that Voldermort's return-proper is inevitable - that the bad guys now have the momentum and the eternally hinted at show-down is finally coming.

The only thing I'd again say is that the film is really very long. I understand that most of the books are pretty long and I'm sure that even this is trimmed down from them, but it does become a bit of a bum-acher when you're breezing past the two hour mark.