Instead it’s a road movie in which our main characters end up traveling together, often isolated and alone. Even in a movie which visits none of the familiar Potter set pieces, like Hogwarts for instance, it still looks and feels like all the magic of a Potter movie is there, in every frame. This is his third Harry Potter movie and by now he knows just what it takes to immerse your eyeballs in a world of witchcraft and wizardry. Luckily, visually at least, Deathly Hallows is as sharp as director David Yates' other Potter efforts. When it doesn’t, those who aren’t already obsessed with the details of this franchise are forced to simply sit back, shut off their brains, and enjoy the special effects.
When it stops for those things, when it makes time for them, this movie works on every conceivable level. It’s a shame that Deathly Hallows doesn’t have more of it. The camaraderie between these people, their chemistry, their relationships, that’s what has always made the Harry Potter franchise work best on film. Harry and Hermione’s dance together inside a tent, just when things seem like they’re at their worst, stuck with me after the credits rolled. It’s those little interactions between them that kept me interested.
All three, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson have grown into full fledged actors perfectly capable of carrying even the most emotional scene.
For the first time, they’re old enough and adult enough to handle it. Those scenes anchor this movie and ask more of its actors than any Harry Potter movie ever has before. In the film’s more intimate moments it becomes about three kids whom you’ve seen grow up on screen stepping into their own as adults.
If you’re able to hang in there through the Potterbabble, you’ll eventually be rewarded, because when Deathly Hallows settles in for real, character development it absolutely soars. In the books that attention to detail is perhaps one of the story’s strengths, but if you haven’t read them or haven’t memorized every detail of the previous movies, then in this film it’s just a big muddle. It’s worse than simply mired in it really, much of the movie’s plot is built almost entirely on it. In much the same way Trek has in the past committed the sin of drowning its audience in meaningless technology chatter, Deathly Hallows is inexorably mired in the endless names and details and spells and trinkets of the Potter universe. In Deathly Hallows maybe it’s more correct to call this a problem of Potterbabble. The most recent Star Trek incarnation strove to solve this problem by focusing on relationships rather than technology, and in the process created something that every audience member could buy into whether or not they’ve read the Star Fleet Technical Manual. In the past it’s been most often applied to things like the Star Trek franchise, when characters have prattled on so endlessly about the buttons they’re pushing, that it overshadows anything genuine or human the less techno-savvy members of the audience might have been able to latch on to. Technobable is a term coined to describe the overuse of technical jargon.