Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince

Posted May 24, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Finally the world has started to believe that Lord Voldemort has returned and his henchmen are getting increasingly active.

Professor Dumbledore is trying to find out more about Voldemort and with the help of Harry Potter persuades Horace Slughorn to come back from retirement. This of course isn’t just because he likes Slughorn so much, but the man has a memory that is vital to understanding Voldemort better and Dumbledore is keen on having it as it may be key to defeating Voldemort once and for ever. Dumbledore requests Harry to get close to Slughorn and gain his trust, and with the book Harry finds that used to belong to someone called the “Half-Blood Prince” Harry manages to excell in Slughorn’s classes and get on good turf with his teacher.

Meanwhile, Draco Malfoy clearly is up to no good but nobody believes Harry when he warns that something bad is going on with the boy. Dark clouds are rising over Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry…

Sound and Vision:
We get good HD images with decent contrast, good level of detail and except for some minor grain here and there nothing to complain about. The colors are often stylized and this nicely adds to the atmosphere.

The sound is pretty good as well with a lossless TrueHD track that is very aggressive during the action scenes. Minor downpoint is that during scenes with plenty of dialogue the effects tend to go down in volume so much that they hardly get noticed anymore.

Extras:
– Maximum Movie Mode
– BD-Live
– Close-up with the Cast
– One minute exercises
– J.K. Rowling: A Year In The Life
– What’s On You Mind
– The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Sneak Peak
- Deleted Scenes

A nice pack of extras where especially the feature about J.K. Rowling deserves some attention. Good stuff.

Conclusion:
Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince is the latest in the series and again we follow our favorite magician apprentice as he fights the forces of evil, in the form of Voldemort’s henchmen. Unfortunately, the movie tends to constantly wander between suspense regarding the main storyline and love stories that seem to have absolutely no use other than prolong the movie. This makes for a rather chaotic movie that’s not always as easy to follow and completely degrades the viewing experience. At times I was completely bored even and started looking at how long I still had to undergo this painful exercise in bad storytelling. The director really did a bad job here.

The Blu-ray release is really good on the technical and extras side but that doesn’t make up for a rather badly put together movie. Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince has some very nice twists that make you long for the next movie, but as part of the series it clearly doesn’t manage to stand up straight. If it wasn’t part of a larger whole, it would completely fall apart. And that’s a shame for a series that has millions of fans worldwide. Harry Potter deserves better.

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