Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
Directed by David Yates
Harry, Ron and Hermione walk away from their last year at Hogwarts to find and destroy the remaining Horcruxes, putting an end to Voldemort's bid for immortality. But with Harry's beloved Dumbledore dead and Voldemort's unscrupulous Death Eaters on the loose, the world is more dangerous than ever.
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What critics compared Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 to
The first parts of multi-installment movies shot back-to-back, like The Deathly Hallows or Breaking Dawn, mostly tread water to ensure all the narrative chess pieces are in place for the grand finale.
Splitting franchise films into two parts made sense for young adult books like “Harry Potter,” “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games,” given that each series boasted thicker tomes with each subsequent release.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Directed by Peter Jackson
Themes Plot Visuals
At times there is a Fellowship of the Ring vibe to the Deathly Hallows.
Fans have described it as patience-testing on the page: Rowling slams the story into low gear and starts piling on more back story and characters and "Fellowship of the Ring"-style quest objects than narrative tightness might favor.
And since I mentioned "LOTR" and CGI, let me just mention that the CGI-ed character of Dobby does call to mind Gollum even though they possess very different personalities.
While this being a Part One film might instill shudders of fear into the spines of viewers experiencing flashbacks to the slower paces of YA films like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) , The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011) , The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014), or the forever unfinished The Divergent Series: Allegiant (2016) (of which I will forever laugh at), or even that of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), this never feels like an incomplete film that solely exists for the sake of teasing audiences to show up again for a Part Two .
Much of that material could have pared down in the film version, but Yates and Kloves unwisely opt to keep it in, along with a number of other minor scenes and references to secondary characters that may delight fans of the book but don’t contribute anything substantial to the film’s storyline.Unlike other movies that end on cliffhangers—like, say,or The Two Towers never develops its own specific narrative arc.
Though the film is, essentially, the second part of a trilogy, and thus starts without a beginning and ends without a conclusion, writer Steve Kloves (who has adapted six of the seven films in the series) does a yeoman's job of structuring the narrative so that Deathly Hallows 1 does function as a story, more or less; in contrast to something like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers , which is virtually incoherent considered as an individual movie.
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But by the end of Francis Lawrence’s scary, stirring picture—the best in the series, and right up there with the marvelous Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 as one of the best Y.A. adaptations in memory—I almost felt the need to forgive myself for, well, doubting myself.