Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
Directed by David Yates
Harry, Ron and Hermione continue their quest to vanquish the evil Voldemort once and for all. Just as things begin to look hopeless for the young wizards, Harry discovers a trio of magical objects that endow him with powers to rival Voldemort's formidable skills.
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What critics say influenced Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
It’s an underground bank raid that combines elements of the trash compactor from Star Wars, the sorcery scene in Fantasia and Indiana Jones’s mine car ride.
She may borrow from Charles Dickens, James Bond, “Star Wars” and Greek mythology, but she does it with flair.
After a perfunctory couple of shots lifted from the end of the first installment of The Deathly Hallows , the film begins in earnest with a scene of slow, quiet urgency at an oceanfront cottage that could have been imported from Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 .
After a roller-coaster-like journey into the underground lair, Harry's, Ron's and Hermione's subsequent escape back to the surface on the back of a dragon who had been guarding the vault is as technically impressive (a mixture of solid CGI, practical effects and models reminding of the seamless work done in 1993's "Jurassic Park") as it is ultimately wondrous when the lot of them take to the sky.
Starting with the first foggy fade-in, my scribbled list of allusions included "Citizen Kane," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Jurassic Park," "West Side Story," "Spartacus," "Aliens," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Gone With the Wind."
That final dalliance is reminiscent of the lengthy epilogue causing The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King to be an utter bladder buster.
People complained about the long epilogue of “The Return of the King,” but Peter Jackson wasn’t ending a two and a half hour movie, he was ending three of them.
The result is a more satisfying conclusion to a series than The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King or any other similar film in memory.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is a towering achievement, a staggering, out-of-nowhere pop filmmaking triumph on par with The Dark Knight , The Return of the King and Spider-Man .
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And a lengthy siege scene, while grim and thrilling, seems to borrow equally from Ran and The Two Towers .
However, with the Battle of Hogwarts, they do not do what Peter Jackson did with the Battle of Helms Deep in The Two Towers and expand it beyond what was on the written page.
The acting is uniformly superb — better than in, say, “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” — especially Alan Rickman as the morally ambiguous Snape, who deserves an Oscar for his exemplary work here.
The vault sequence couldn't have been done much better by Guillermo del Toro; some hallucinatory close-ups of Voldemort as he wrestles with Harry will kindle fond memories of the satyr in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 4; and the design of one glutinous creature (the exact nature of which I will not divulge), coated in a blood-and-mustard mucus, is positively Cronenbergian.
“Part 1” opened with the “Hostel”-like torture of a Hogwarts teacher and, intriguingly, conjured memories of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” by equating the rise of Voldemort and the Dark Forces to the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany.
You cannot now imagine anyone else in these roles, much like Judy Garland will be forever immortalized as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
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Cinematographer Eduardo Serra ("Blood Diamond") and production designer Stuart Craig ("The English Patient," "Mary Reilly" and aboard the Potter train since the beginning) are the artists most to be congratulated for the achievement.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is a towering achievement, a staggering, out-of-nowhere pop filmmaking triumph on par with The Dark Knight , The Return of the King and Spider-Man .
In the 10 years since the November 2001 opening of the first and most successful Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, there have been films from other franchises that have made far bigger splashes at the box office: the third Star Wars prequel, the third Lord of the Rings film, the first two Spider-Man titles, The Dark Knight, and the second Transformers installment, which handily beat Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , the second-most successful Potter film, head-to-head two summers ago.