The other DrC and I saw the first screening of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince this afternoon. Interestingly, the theater wasn't full for the first showing. Perhaps Pottermania is on the wane.
The casting is pretty standard, no real surprises. The Slughorn character is played well, albeit by a man who isn't particularly fat. The casting of the young Tom Riddle isn't bad. Some things happen in the film which were not in the book, I won't go into details as we'll try to avoid spoilers.
This is the book, and film, where the kids start getting interested in love, and discreetly in sex. Romance actually has a bigger place in the film than in the book, no real surprise there. The action sequences with the jet-propelled death eaters are well-done. As is typical in the HP films, they had to cut out a lot of stuff to make a movie of manageable length. For uber-fans, this truncation is sad but real.
The death of a major character which happens at the end of the book (and the film) has much less emotional impact in the film, I suspect Jo Rowling isn't entirely happy with this rendering. Perhaps she is less involved with the films than she once was? The funeral is omitted, with the film perhaps ending before it takes place. One wonders if the funeral will be the beginning of film seven?
My verdict: Potter fans will like the film, which takes a quicker, and slightly different path through the familiar landscape of book six. Someone who has no prior knowledge of the Potter canon may find the film a bit hard to follow.
