Harry Potter

It really has been an impressive feat: eight movies over the course of ten years, featuring (mostly) the same cast all the way throughout. I don't need to get into the specifics of it though, because as a living, breathing human being you are very aware of what's happened here. You know the story whether you want to or not, whether you've read the books or not or even seen one movie or all eight (or none, if that's your thing). Harry Potter has infected the world, and the movie industry will never be quite the same - at the very least, we'll be barraged with fantasy movie franchises based on terrible (and decent, I suppose) books geared at kids and teenagers. If Harry Potter wasn't around, would we have the Twilight series? Think about that. Sure, Twilight may have been adapted into a movie regardless, but would they try and compress the entire run of books into one movie? I think the Harry Potter franchise has allowed the industry to dedicate a book per movie (and given everybody massive multi-movie contracts to ensure the same cast). But this is all besides the point that I don't really need or even want to get into.

I went to see The Deathly Hallows Part 2 at a midnight showing, which is definitely a new experience and a fitting one for the end of the Harry Potter series. You have to understand that I've seen every Potter movie in the theatre, within the first couple weeks of release each time. This is not unusual: I'm sure a lot of people did this. But it is relevant: it's ten years of sticking to one series. The problem is, there has been a ton of trilogies the past decade; the industry has changed and it's no problem for this sort of thing to happen. We didn't really get that in the 90's, although the 80's was full of them too (Back to the Future, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc). This Harry Potter spree is made more relevant - to me - in that I never got to see any of those aforementioned trilogies in their entirety in the theatre. I saw The Last Crusade in the theatre, even the third (should have been final) Die Hard, and maybe the last two Back to the Future films. Now, we have super-hero trilogies that come out every two years or so: you can see them all on the big screen without much hassle. But even with the current, and old franchises taken into consideration, there hasn't been as many to them as Harry Potter. And for that, there is significance.

The midnight showing was fantastic, and I don't think we really knew what we were getting into. There was a 12:01, 12:02 and 12:03 showing. What we didn't know was that each of those would be on three different screens each. This amounted to a lot of people catching one movie at the same time: the concession stands were absolutely insane, even an hour before the shows started. It goes without saying that the shows were sold out and theatres were at capacity. We arrived two hours before showtime; we were lucky to get decent seats. We got to see a lot of different people come in, and not as many costumes as I thought there would be: it's so easy to put on Harry glasses and the scar. There were people of all ages, but it was clear it was a younger crowd. I'm guessing the average age was around sixteen - and many were accompanied by their parents.

There was one kid sitting beside me - and I say kid loosely because he was clearly in his mid-teens (with his mom) and much taller than myself. This kid was ecstatic. He was literally vibrating throughout the movie. He shifted constantly, his fingers and hands in constant motion, and little seated jumps of joy every time something happened on screen. First, was my thought on how something like this could make one person so excited. Second, was realizing that Harry Potter has been in this kid's life since he was at least six or eight years old. If you add in the books, even younger (perhaps his parents read them to him when he was four, who knows). But even playing around with the ages a bit, and it's easy to see that this movie series has been around for a decade, and that's a huge portion of a person's life (a third of mine). If you're twenty, you've been going to see these since you were ten. That's insane. You've done a lot of growing from ten to twenty (obviously) both physically and mentally, and to be growing up with Harry Potter and his buddies must make the end of the series that much more significant. You're not just saying goodbye to a movie series, you're saying goodbye to friends.

All that, made the experience worth every penny. You could tell that people were waiting for specific scenes, just by how excited they become and their reaction when the scene finally did appear. I lost out on a lot of this as I didn't read the books, but I could feed off of, and appreciate the crowd. Was the film any good? The past few have been a bit of a bummer, but it ended well. Part 1 was boring and dragging; this one was all action. In the end, Harry didn't really do any spectacular magic but perhaps it doesn't matter. They've been a blast to watch.