It may contain spoilers for those who had not watched the sixth instalment of the Harry Potter film. My own review of the film (Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince) which I watched it yesterday. It is three out of five for me.
(The review)
It was only after Sirius Black’s death in the previous instalment, the whole of the wizarding community finally believed what Harry Potter had knew all along. Lord Voldermort or the Dark Lord as he is known in the wider wizarding world is well and truly back. The wizarding world is convinced that Harry, who survived the Dark Lord’s attack on him when he was a year old, is the ‘Chosen One’.
In the summer, strange occurrences had been happening in the Muggle world of London. Dark clouds swirling around the London sky, a bridge had been cracked apart for no apparent reason. It was something not expected. Harry went on with his summer holidays at usual, and when he met Professor Dumbledore, it was after he was finished reading what had been reported in The Daily Prophet (it was about him being the ‘Chosen One’) at a cafe in an underground train station. Professor Dumbledore had something for Harry to do.
The Hogwarts headmaster wanted Harry to help persuade a friend of his to come out of retirement to teach at Hogwarts. As usual as it is the case, there is always a vacant post after the end of each school year. Both Dumbledore and Harry were due to meet Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), who once had his own selected group of personal favourite students including Harry’s late mother Lily. Initially Slughorn refused to give in, and it was only after Dumbledore and Harry left (this was after Dumbledore had finished using the toilet) then Slughorn decided to come out of retirement.
Meanwhile, the murderer of Sirius Black in Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter) and Mrs. Narcissa Malfoy (Helen McCrory) made a visit to Professor Snape. It was in view that Lord Voldermort had assigned Narcissa’s son Draco who is in the same year as Harry at Hogwarts, a task. Narcissa was worried of the fact that with her son’s age, he had actually being tasked to do what Lord Voldermort had assigned. Bellatrix suggested that they should do an Unbreakable Vow. It is in the event that should Draco would not able to fulfil Lord Voldermort’s wish, it would be Snape himself to do it on Draco’s behalf.
At the almost-empty Diagon Alley on the opening of Ron’s twin brothers’ joke shop, Harry knew Draco was up to something after he and his friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley (Harry would eventually spent his entire summer at the Weasleys’ residence) secretly trailed their classmate who was together with people he did not knew about when they (not the trio, that is) entered Borgin & Burkes. There is always something sinister going on at Borgin & Burkes and Harry knew something was suspicious about Draco being there. But when on the train back to Hogwarts, Hermione wondered if Harry was reading too much into things with Harry’s conclusion that Draco has actually become a Death Eater (during Lord Voldermort’s rise to power before it was thwarted by Harry’s survival, he recruited people who believe in his cause and they are called the Death Eaters).
But even if there was a confrontation between Harry and Draco after everyone else had gotten off the train and returned back to Hogwarts which ended quickly after it begun, the magical world is definitely not as safe as before. In between the fears that there could be a possibility that the Death Eaters would invade Hogwarts, there are the cases of Slughorn had returned back to his old ways of trying to select students who could be his next group of personal favourites, the case of the teenage hormones really kicking in for Harry and his friends. At the same time, Professor Dumbledore has been together with Harry, trying to understand more about what possibly make Tom Riddle who would eventually be known to the wizarding community as Lord Voldermort as the most darkest wizard in wizarding history. And also, why is Harry’s Potions book is the ‘property of the Half-Blood Prince’?
Even as someone who had read the book beforehand and not holding any pre-judgement of what the film may hold, the film adaptation kind of disappointed me somewhat. But watch it for Horace Slughorn, the teenage hormones which hit Harry and those he knows, the final scenes. There are the occasional times I could not bear to watch the cave scene which Dumbledore suspected Lord Voldermort had hidden something there.
For me on a personal scale, the final scenes were definitely scarier than I had imagined. One would eventually know what had Lord Voldermort actually assigned Draco Malfoy to do and one will know why Draco’s mother Narcissa was initially worried of it.
