Harry Potter and the last scene

This is it, the culmination of many, many years, finally the Avengers movie! No, wait... the last Harry Potter movie!

This movie is very much a continuation of the series, even more than it is part two to part one. This is not a movie you watch unless you know what has gone before. And, I'll get to later, unless you have read the books. In this movie, Harry goes to Gringott's, then has a big fight scene... and that's about it. The action overrides everything else, there need to be big moments, and so smaller character moments are trodden over very quickly to get back to the big fight. And then the ending happens, without, it must be confessed, as much fanfare as you'd expect. (And there's the epilogue, with the rather creepy looking CGI'd up actors.)

All this momentum means that exposition gets thrown out the window. Some of which I was glad of, however there's a lot of explanation that you need to understand why things happened the way they did and what they meant that are completely missed. Here's where you really need to have read the books, to understand what Harry's sacrifice meant, to understand what's rally going on with the wands, to understand Snape's backstory, to get closure in King's Cross... The movie, even being part two, only has so much time, and doesn't spend it on explaining much if it can get through a hurried explanation in fast forward, presuming it can't skip it entirely.

Which is a pity, as a lot of moments pass without the audience (who isn't completely up to speed with who is whom) (okay, maybe just me), and there are some deaths and such that I went 'who's that then?' Kinda undercuts it.

This is something that might need to be watched as part of an eight movie marathon... but, to be honest, go read the books. Although they fall apart after book four, they hold together and explain what's going on far better than the movies do.

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