Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Daniel Radcliffe)

(Amazon UK link)

We didn’t watch a film last week, but last night decided to watch ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’, to continue our re-watching of these DVDs in our collection. We first saw this in 2017 although I re-read the book a couple of years later, so I was reasonably familiar with the plot. 

It’s the darkest of the series so far, with a rating of 12: this is due to quite a bit of violence and some very disturbing scenes. But then Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) are 17 now, in the sixth year at Hogwarts: what we would call Year 12 (or Lower Sixth) in muggle schools in the UK. 

The film opens with scenes of carnage around London; it’s clearly shown as random violence, for no purpose other than to create devastation and to let the world know that something terrible is happening. Lord Voldemort is back; even the official Ministry of Magic have acknowledged this now. Everyone is urged to be cautious, and to be careful whom they trust. 

Harry is spending his summer travelling around on trains, and attracting the interest of a local girl - however this is interrupted when Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) appears and whisks Harry off to visit his old friend Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent). Professor Slughorn was a former teacher at Hogwarts, and apparently rather a good teacher; but he had his favourites, which included Harry’s mother. Dumbledore wants to persuade Slughorn to return to Hogwarts…

Harry then spends a few days with the Weasley family, only to have terror striking there too. And even on the journey back to Hogwarts, he finds himself in trouble, and almost ends up back in London. 

We don’t see much going on in the classrooms in this film, other than Harry’s discovery of an old text-book which has a note in the front saying it belongs to the half-blood prince. It enables him to do very well in one topic, but it doesn’t really have the significance that it has in the book. 

Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) has been asked to do something dangerous but we don’t know what it is until towards the end of the film, and Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) has promised to look after Draco, and assist him in what he needs to do. We see more of Draco than in previous books, with a much greater depth of character as he works to establish what needs to be done, but also finds himself torn, and very stressed. 

There’s lots of fast action - I had to shut my eyes a few times - and some distressing scenes towards the end when Harry has to follow orders in a disturbing way. We knew what was coming in the final climax, of course, but it’s still poignant. 

There’s some light relief to contrast the dark themes, with growing love interests amongst Harry’s classmates, and an amusing scene (which turns very dark) involving a large dose of love potion. A few other students have larger roles than before, and the acting throughout is excellent.

‘Harry Potter and the half-blood prince’ is not one of my favourites of the series, either the book or the film. But it’s a necessary episode in the ongoing saga, and the end leads on to the beginning of the seventh book and film. It is worth seeing if you’re watching the films, but it wouldn’t stand alone: it’s quite confusing with so much rapid action and visuals rather than explanations, and would be all the more so for anyone who had not seen the earlier films (or read the books).

And, as with all these films, in my opinion it’s well worth reading the books too as there’s so much more in them; characters are fleshed out, other storylines are included, and there’s a lot more discussion about morality, ethics, and the unconditional love that caused Harry to survive the attack on his life when he was a baby.

Review copyright 2023 Sue's DVD Reviews