Half-Blood Prince Review

Jennifer and I decided last-minute to see the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I figured I was already way off my schedule, so I might as well write a review as well. I published it this morning around 5:30. My review is targeted to those already familiar with the story. I'll be interested to see if I notice anything new -- or change my mind about anything -- on a second viewing.

Feel free to let me know if you have a different take on the film.

Read my review, "Movie Does Justice to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."

Update: David Yates discusses leaving out the Minister and adding in a couple of of scenes not from the book. I liked the bridge scene, but the waitress scene seemed out of place. I wish he had dumped it and put the Minister back in!

Tales of Beedle the Bard

I've written a review of J. K. Rowling's book of fairy tales, Tales of Beedle the Bard Expands Rowling's Moral Themes.

My least favorite story is "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot," because it mixes themes and develops them poorly. My favorite is "The Fountain of Fair Fortune." I find the other three tales to have interesting things to say about psychology, politics, and dealing with death.

Read the entire review.

Values of Harry Potter

My just-published book Values of Harry Potter discusses the themes of courage, independence, and free will in Rowling's novels. As this blog focuses on religion, here I'll summarize my treatment of the subject in the book.

The first three chapters are not about religion. Instead, the first chapter describes the heroic fight for values in the Harry Potter novels. As I review, Harry and his allies fight for for their lives, their futures, their friends, and their liberty. They do so against the viciously evil Lord Voldemort. In the second chapter I discuss the virtue of independence that the heroes display; in the third I review the themes of free will in the books.

Chapter Four explicitly takes up the religious theme of sacrifice. I contrast the heroic fight for life-promoting values with self-sacrifice. I briefly discuss Ayn Rand's view of sacrifice and spend several pages going through Aristotle's views of friendship and self-love. I point out that sacrifice does not mean abusing others; it means surrendering a higher value for a lower one (as Rand says). Friends are crucially important to our lives, so it's not sacrificial to fight for our friends; doing so promotes our values. I review numerous cases from the Potter books in this light.

Chapter Five is titled, "Materialism and Immortality." "Voldmort," others have noted, means "flight from death." Mortality and life after death are large and explicit themes in Rowling's books. I explain how the Horcrux relates to a crass sort of materialism and a pathological fear of death (as well as the abuse of others). I also discuss how these themes relate to the themes values, independence, and sacrifice.

Obviously my book is intended for readers of the Harry Potter novels. So if you haven't finished them yet, get going! You can read the introduction to my book on its web page.

Notes on the Harry Potter Movies

I just watched the third Harry Potter film again. While the fifth book (The Order of the Phoenix) remains my favorite, the third movie (The Prisoner of Azkaban) is the finest of the series so far. The first two films are enjoyable companions to the books. But the third movie is a stand-alone artwork. The timing in the first two films is awkward and distracting. The third movie is impeccably timed. Moreover, the the use of lighting, camera movement, and transitions, as well as the creative visual interpretations of the book, place the third movie a step above. I was thrilled to find that the fifth movie is also quite good; it takes a close second, in my book.

I see that the sixth film is "in production." The director is David Yates, who also directed Phoenix. So that's encouraging.

I hope that the producers of the films consider splitting the seventh book -- The Deathly Hallows -- into two movies. There is simply too much material in the book to allow for a single movie of reasonable length. Besides, there's a perfect place the split the movie: Chapter 24. Specifically, page 481. I think readers of the book will understand what I mean. Ending the movie there would be a fitting tribute to the character who fills that page. Then the eighth movie could be called, Harry Potter and the Battle of Hogwarts. Obviously, they should film both movies during the same period to save costs and maintain better continuity. Splitting the final book into two movies would make the studio a lot more money as well as please fans.

Harry Potter's Success

The Harry Potter books have been phenomenally successful. CNN reports, "The last installment of the Harry Potter series sold a record-breaking 11.5 million copies in the U.S. in the first 10 days on sale... To date, more than 350 million copies of the seven books in the Harry Potter series have been sold worldwide."

And Potter is very much an international phenomenon. The Guardian reports:

Publisher Bloomsbury [of Britain] revealed [on September 18, 2007] that its English-language version of the boy wizard's final tale has sold as many copies overseas as in the UK. In Germany alone [one million] copies were sold in the last month. Pre-orders in China were more than 200% higher than those of the previous book.... [T]he untranslated Harry Potters have seen huge demand from impatient fans who want the books as soon as they come out.

The books have sold so well in part because they are very well written fantasy stories with richly drawn characters. Even though Harry and his friends can do amazing things, it's easy to imagine living in their world while reading the books. But part of the reason the books have sold so well is that Rowling presents a strong moral message of courage and strong character that children are obviously hungry for.

Rowling's sales figures are indeed impressive. By way of comparison, Ayn Rand wrote some of the most influential novels of the 20th Century. Yet, according to a biography from 1995, "Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totalling more than twenty million." Even assuming robust sales since then, Rand's books have sold less than ten percent the numbers of Rowling's books. (No doubt sales of Atlas Shrugged will get a boost when and if the movie ever reaches the screen.)

But numbers don't mean that much. What will be the lasting cultural influence of, for example, The Da Vinci Code? The reason that Rand's books have had such influence is that they present in dramatic form philosophic ideas of profound personal importance to the reader. The Harry Potter books present some important ideas, but they are not as profound, as original, or as integrated into the story.

The main reason that Rowling has had and will continue to have such profound cultural influence is that she is reaching millions of children when they are first exploring ideas and first thinking about moral choices. Harry and his best friends belong to the school house of Gryffindor, the house of the brave, and Rowling presents an inspiring image of moral courage. (I'll have more to say about Rowling's themes at a later time.)

But perhaps the best thing about Rowling's books is that they have encouraged children to grapple with a complex story and difficult themes. The children who have graduated from those books will be prepared to read -- and eager to find -- other great and inspiring works of literature, such as Rand's novels.