stream harry potter deathly hallows part 2

Similarly, the special effects in Harry Potter aren’t just there to look neat they serve as glimpses into a fully fleshed-out alternate reality with its own history, logic, and laws.Īcross its whole sweep-which in retrospect now does seem genuinely epic-the Harry Potter series offers one ravishing special effect no digital compositor or makeup artist can match: the opportunity to see the three leads, Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint, age from adorably buck-toothed 11-year-olds into young men and women toward whom the audience now feels an oddly avuncular pride.

The magic is in the details, like the masterful production design by Stuart Craig, who’s been with the series since the beginning and has by now created a densely imagined universe in which, for example, paintings on a wall double as doorways into other dimensions.

These kids have a magic to-do list a mile long.īut you don’t need to grasp the significance of every enchanted artifact in order to submit to the enchantment of this movie. In search of these metaphysically charged trinkets, the three Hogwarts alums must break into a subterranean bank vault guarded by a pitiably abused fire-breathing dragon consult with a tower-dwelling ghost (a memorably eerie Kelly McDonald) about the location of her mother’s magic diadem hunt Voldemort’s pet serpent with a tooth from a basilisk skeleton and-you get the picture. The films don’t feel like cynical cash-cow milking sessions but like chapters in an unfolding story, each one (especially the last four in the series, directed by David Yates) establishing the necessary framework for the next. Some of the installments may be static, others overlong, but there’s an essential integrity to the Harry Potter series, stemming no doubt from Rowling’s close association with the production process throughout. Children excited about reading! A bunch of books about-this warms the cockles of any education-loving heart-a school! A school in which kids learn to be smart and brave and honest so they can use their magical powers to fight intolerance and evil! The Potter films have managed to explore hopelessly square human truths-about pedagogy and mentorship, loyalty and betrayal, adolescent rivalry and puppy love-without ever seeming goody-two-shoes about it. Maybe this mysteriously ineradicable Potter goodwill comes from my sense that Harry Potter as a phenomenon is so self-evidently a force for good in the world.

Stream harry potter deathly hallows part 2