To be entirely fair to the latest installment in the Harry Potter series of movies, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, I definitely should not be the one reporting on them. Don’t get me wrong, I am an avid Harry Potter fan, and devoured the first five books in record time. However, when book six came out, everything started going pear-shaped.
So when the traditional antics begin around the movie of the aforementioned book, life just gets worse for me.
The latest news, from Latino Review, is that Emma Thompson will not be reprising her seemingly terribly relevant role of Sybil Trelawney in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. This latest revelation adds to the absences of the characters of Fleur, Bill and Percy Weasley, the Gaunts, Hepzibah Smith, and Moaning Myrtle.
Now, given Thompson’s roles in past movies, you might think that leaving her out of this movie is a non-issue. You’d be very wrong.
[SPOILER AHEAD from Book 6]
In fact, Trelawney is the one who alerts Harry to the fact that Draco was “celebrating” in the Room of Requirement — the room that Harry had run his defense training in back in his fifth year — and that Snape was the one who had overheard her and Dumbledore’s discussion of her prophecy about Harry and Voldemort.
However, it is clear by the exclusion of the Gaunts that director David Yates has no real intention on keeping true to J.K. Rowling’s books.
(Now I realize I am just talking to die-hard Harry Potter fans here, so for anyone else, skip down a few paragraphs to the part about the latest photos from the movie.) But by removing Trelawney, in addition to the Gaunts and Hepzibah Smith, Yates has shown that he will not be paying much attention to the storyline of HP 6. In fact, the reason that I disliked HBP so much was because of the continual and excruciatingly slow revelation of information concerning people like the Gaunts, Hepzibah, etc. It overwhelmed the book, and any real action or entertaining aspects of the book were washed away under the tide of anecdotal evidence Dumbledore decided Harry finally needed to know.
Now mentioning Harry always gets me upset, because I dislike him almost as much as I dislike Book Six, and just looking at the images (which Warner Bros. is on a cease and desist crusade to have removed from the internet) makes me groan for seeing that emo face again.
But the real question, away from my random dislikes, is why is Rowling allowing her books to be so torn apart solely for the benefit of making movies that, let’s face it, are not stellar. I would say I hate to think like this, but it would be a lie, but the only explanation is that Rowling is more than happy to allow the bastardization and butchering of her books solely so she can make a few more bucks out of them. It would definitely fit the profile of the woman who is trying to take down a book that will be a guide to her work.
As I mentioned, Warner Bros. seems to be trying to take down the photos, and seem to have been doing so while I wrote this article. So instead of posting any images ourselves, we’ll just link to the ones that are still up, where they originally started from, at BlogHogwarts.com.
Either way, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is definitely not a film that I’m currently freaked out about seeing, but one that I will stand in line for anyway.