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I truly got lucky. After Summer Weapons Retreat, while esrblog and I were still in Michigan, I managed to instigate an expedition with a subset of my out-of-town friends to see "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the movie version of book 6 and the latest Harry Potter film to hit the theaters.

I enjoyed the film, with some reservations that I can't explain without venturing pretty deep into SpoilerLand. I can say three things without spewing spoilers:

* The casting continues to be superb.
* Director Yates continues to film in what a famous film critic has aptly described as a palette of "lead and sepia".
* Yates's approach to this movie gives us a vital clue as to how he is likely to film the two remaining movies (i.e., the two movies we've been told will be made from Book 7).

Most of the reviewers, and a lot of the friends I've talked with about the movie, have come to the same conclusion; Half-Blood Prince isn't really a full movie. A lot of the story lines of the book--the process by which Harry decides to use, and ultimately share, the bottle of luck potion he wins in Potions Class--are cut, though there is blessedly little in the movie that was out-and-out invented, as best as I could recall from having read the book several years ago.

It occurred to me, after I'd finished watching the movie, that I suddenly understood what Yates's formula for the Harry Potter movies he is making is.

Yates has decided not to treat the individual books as separate stories at all. He is treating the series, particularly numbers 5, 6, 7 (part 1) and 7 (part 2) as movies that combine to tell a single, continuing story--the story of how Harry and his friends discover and destroy, first the Horcruxes, and then Voldemort himself.

This hypothesis explains, at least to me, one of the more annoying decisions Yates made in the movie versions of "Order of the Phoenix." As I wrote in my review of that movie, I thought that Yates rearranged material in the final climactic fight at the Department of Mysteries section of the Ministry of Magic that undermined one of Rowling's major themes for the series--how our young heroes are forced to step up and fight for their lives, and for what they believe is right, even before they reach adult age.

But Yates hasn't really cut that theme out. He merely shortened it up and moved it--to the scene he puts in "Half-Blood Prince," showing Ginny, Harry, and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley in the cornfield near the Weasley home, backs together, wands at the ready--prepared to defend themselves and their loved ones from Death Eaters. This scene, which physically mirrors some of the dueling scenes in the fifth movie, *does* emphasize the "assuming adult respondibility" theme--even if it does so in a stylized manner Rowling could eschew because she had the luxury of extending the story by many extra pages.

I understand and respect Yates's choice, though I regret it, because in my opinion it cuts out just about every scene that made the book version of "Half-Blood Prince" fun to read, such as Hermione's sleuthing to attempt to help Harry discover who the "Half-Blood Prince" is. On the other hand, he has been forced to add short bits to make sure the audience "gets" certain character developments that are necessary to appreciate the uberstory's ultimate denouement. Thus, Snape does *not* snarl and threaten Harry when Harry catches up to him after the killing of Dumbledore (as he did in the book). We also see Snape almost tenderly healing Draco's wounds after the bathroom dueling scene in which Harry uses the "sectumsempra" curse. Both of these are, clearly, paving the way for the big voyage into Snape's memories (which Rowling split up into the last two books) that will finally reveal Snape's true motivations.

On the other hand, most of the scenes that Yates *does* keep from HBP are fully realized and beautifully done. The session in Slughorn's first Potions class where Harry wins the luck potion is priceless, as are the subsequent scenes with Slughorn, and the memory views of Tom Riddle as a Hogwarts student are chilling.

If one accepts the hypothesis that Yates isn't really trying to make the remaining movies into independent stories, his handling of "Half-Blood Prince" suddenly makes much more sense. He is giving us the scenes, and *only* the scenes, that are necessary to comprehend the key points in the search for the Horcruxes and the death of Voldemort. If he can work some of Rowling's themes into those key scenes, he likely will (in the same offhand way he worked the responsibility theme from book 5 belatedly into movie 6), but he won't add a scene if it is not essential to the Horcrux/Voldemort plot.

Based on my theory, I predict (for example):

* That most of the exposition about the origins of the Deathly Hallows will be cut, and the whole very much shortened (I doubt he'll bother to account for what becomes of all of the Hallows, for example);

* That Yates will likely cut the scene in the Ministry of Magic where our heroes go undercover;

* That Yates likely will *not* cut the scene where our heroes break into Gringotts;

* That we will learn all we're ever going to learn about Grindelwald in Yates's version of the last conversation Harry has with Dumbledore, while the two of them are (arguably) both in the Great Beyond;

* That the final battle at Hogwarts will be greatly condensed and most of what we'll get to see is Harry's final confrontation with Voldemort. (I really regret this one, because Molly Weasley's duel with Bellatrix LeStrange is one of my favorite bits from the last book.)

Yates *might* cut the Epilogue scene, but I doubt it; it's short but conveys a lot of information--and that seems to be Yates's preferred style.

Overall, I'm content with Yates's approach. Rowling devoted what has to be nearly 7,000 pages to Harry's tale; getting the rudiments into even 8 movies will be a stretch. If the price for that is that the movies do not really stand alone as independent stories, I'm willing to live with that.

EDIT: I moved some paragraphs around in the interest of organization but have not really changed the content of the above.