Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1: The 90 Minute Wicked Edition

stankpac jul 21 2011

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

shortround24 jun 28 2011

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

emphatic jul 21 2011

So, I watched this today (AVCHD, stripped down to just the movie file to watch in my HTPC, so sadly I’ve missed out on all the cool extras).

Video is crisp and good, but some compression artifacts are present on dark areas, but doesn’t bother me much, however, the scene in the Malfoy’s basement felt a bit too bright and sunny considering the situation.

Audio is magnificent.

The edit worked very well for me all in all, but there were some stuff, good and IMHO less good that should be mentioned:

* The Harry Potter title appeared twice (just before Snape enters the story and after Nagini has a snack). The second one felt redundant.

* I loved how a bitter Ron turns of the light in the tent, cutting short Harry and Hermiones discussion about the sword of Godric Gryffindor and his line afterwards then a swift cut.

* When Harry is pulled out of the icy water by Ron, the conversation kinda reveals that Ron has been gone, why else would Harry be so surprised? Perhaps adding an “always the tone of surprise” could fix it? :D

As a fan of the book, I prefer the theatrical version, but for a quick fix or paired with a shorter part 2 this edit is excellent. I give this a 9.5/10.

geminigod jul 20 2011

I finally got around to watching this. (In fact I watched it with my mother!)

1) I think the Lumos! extra feature was my favorite part! The creative fun you had with it really showed. It also technically impressed me. I’m still not really sure how you fluidly worked the split screen like you did! And it was set brilliantly to the chosen music.

2) Presentation-wise, this fanedit is brilliant. The menu and extras (including the hidden easter egg video) is fantastic! AEmovieguy is definitely not short on creativity.

2) As far as the movie goes, I was pretty excited about the plan for this edit. After watching it, I had two separate feelings. For me personally as someone who is familiar with the book and theatrical release I was overall grateful for the cuts made, glad it was shorter, and sometimes wishing it were even shorter yet. But simultaneously I couldn’t help but feel that perhaps he cut too deeply unnecessarily in some scenes at the cost of character, story development, and dramatic tension, and not enough in a couple spots surrounding your camping cuts where the characters’ reactions now don’t make sense. (There were also a couple awkward fades in the camping stuff.) I fear that someone watching this who had never seen the original or read the book would be very confused and feel that the movie felt disjointed. This seems to be one of the more challenging concepts with fanediting. Because of the audience here, faneditors can often get away with leaving certain character or story threads a little splinched, but when taken in as an original story and graded soley on its own merit, critics would probably respond less favorably.

3) I watched the AVCHD version. The audio sounded excellent. Strong work there. Visually I suspect this edit looks great on DVD. On AVCHD it doesn’t look bad per say, but just not as good as it could given the blu-ray source. This is more apparent in some scenes due to your adjustment to the luma levels, but that color correcting effect seems to just be enhancing some other underlying compression or resolution data loss that occurred prior to applying the effect. This is evident in the Lumos extra video comparing both versions side by side.

With all that in mind, I rated this edit 7/10.

AEmovieguy put an impressive amount of work into this and it shows. It is not perfect in my opinion, but it is well worth the time to watch for anyone like myself who felt the source material for this story was flawed and who does not want to see an exact reproduction of The Deathly Hallows book.

sunarep jul 2 2011

In my eyes Harry Potter 7 (and probably 8 as well) was the victim of fanboys having too much influence on the creative process – resulting in a product tailored for the bean counters that don’t realise that a good adaption is never a scene by scene recreation of the book or that faithful is not equal to following every tiny detail.

Because of that Deathly Hallows while enjoyable never reached the status of a truly marvelous adaption that could stand on it’s own two feet.
AEmovieguy delivers the closest thing we will probably ever get to this: a fast paced version of a movie that should have never been split apart.

STORY (9/10)

The problems with both book and movies for me were:

1) the obviously from lord of the rings lifted plot
2) the obligatory “it’s fantasy so there has to be a lof of nothing happening”
3) plotdevices over plotdevices

make no mistake a lot of those things are still there but cutting away the deluminator makes the ride much more plausible, the thing itself is now no longer of plot importance, but still it is not as much of a missing plotline since ron uses it once to turn of the light and once to turn it back on so let’s just assume dumbledore wanted the kids to have a flashlight :P

Cutting out ron’s forced character drama also works to the story’s advantage – even more it shows how unneeded the initial conflict was since ron’s jealousy is still there when hermione and harry are walking together

it even enhances the character of ron or at least adds “suspense” since up until the horcrux’s destruction ron has not yet made a conscious decision to stand on harry’s side whereas in the original version he has proven his loyalty already by returning

Getting rid of godric’s hollow is also a great improvement – yes it is sentimental bla bla grave of parents bla, but the sequence was never important, neither in the book nor in the movie and is more of a wasted potential than a great scene
where in the book one could have semi-argued why it had to be there Godric’s Hollow was never important in the movies and our heroes don’t do anything useful there so it just adds to the frustration

The only thing weird that remained was the Rita Skeeter discussion at the wedding since the obvious “harry later in the movie you have to go there” plot setup remains but in this version he never goes there.. maybe one could make the case for the dumbledore biography’s introduction… not sure about that

Moving the mirror to sirius’s bedroom is a stroke of genius which I never understood in the original. I firmly believed before seeing the film it would go like this, but as I mentioned: this movie was more about pleasing the “it has to be exactly like in the book” group than standing on its own

EDITING (9/10)

Sadly the obliviate montage and the discussion about wiping memories is gone, but the editor explained his reasons so this is a personal complaint

Moving the flesh memory before the snatchers seemed like a wise move since the snatchers distract from the fact that the “realization” doesn’t really do anything, but as another reviewer said there is a lip problem with hermione because the voiceover is during the scene where harry and hermione walk
Also the discovery of the hallows symbol in the book seems a bit overkill – the audience is already wrestling with that they see harry and hermione coming fromt he snatchers while talking about something via voiceover that was in a scene before and then they get another voiceover dump and a picture of a symbol

I think the sequence would work better if the discovery of the symbol would be moved between the sequences of travelling through britain.

Harry using the charm on the fire now feels a little out of context since in this version he doesn’t break his wand
same goes for hermione being mad – now it seems as if aunt erma is visiting instead of a plausible character evolution

PRESENTATION (9/10)
The dvd menu is pretty nice and the chapter selection is also done very much in the vein of official dvd menus instead of just pasting pictures of the chapters onto a static background so that is pretty nice to look at and shows the faneditor caring about his edit
only a semi transparent bar for the title menu would have been nice since the “start movie” and “scene selection” overlap with the title of the opening menu

TECHNICAL (10/10)
Clear picture, clear sound, nice edit and it just continues to amaze me how much the quality of this site has risen – i mean hell this is a firstling, I am pretty sure that 2-3 years ago something like that would have been a holy grail for edits

the fact that it is “another good edit” speaks for how much the ambition has risen

OVERALL 9/10
It won’t replace my original dvd – not yet :D