Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Revisited (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2) Anjohan
Deathly Hallows is very interesting as an adaption due to it being split into two parts. The first film is way more faithful to the book and slow-paced, while the second film is by design more action-packed, but also has many changes from the book. Some of these improve the film but others worsen the impact of the story. Looking at the runtime for the edit it’s 3.5 hours so there’s a lot that ended up on the cutting room floor, nearly 1 hour, and I was interested to see which of the two halves would have the most stuff cut. Just like Half-Blood Prince, Deathly Hallows is the most fan-edited Potter movie, but I saw things in this that I’ve never seen another Potter Edit even attempt. First off I was very impressed by the addition and integration of the deleted scenes. A few of the ones added have never been used in other fan edits and were inserted without breaking the pacing of the film. There are also some flashes of clips from the previous movies added that were flawlessly inserted.
Pretty much all of the cuts in this edit are seamless, the action scenes have some stuff removed that you would never notice unless you’ve seen the film many times before. Several moments of humor have also been removed which makes the tone more pervasively dark. It also removes a few scenes from the first half that I barely noticed was gone. I was also wondering if a certain subplot would be removed, specifically because one of the other edits also removed a similar subplot, and was pleasantly surprised to see it remain. I think it does actually improve the series to have this be removed from the earlier film in which it occurs but remain in this one because it serves a better narrative, to be here than previously. I’m being very careful not to spoil because I think the edit should be watched as blind as possible.
It was impressive how much was able to be removed from the movie and have it be seamless a lot is cut from part one but almost none of it is noticeable. There were only a few edits I don’t think worked. One of them was the transition from part 1 to part 2. It’s kind of hard to explain why, but I think it’s a mix of replacing Dobby’s death theme with A Window To The Past, and cutting out them burying him. It just removed the emotional impact for me, and I just didn’t feel as cut by the death as I usually am. The other edit that didn’t work is the removal of them first trying to get into Gringotts. They get to Diagon Alley and then we almost immediately transition into the mine cart sequence and suddenly there’s a new character we haven’t been introduced to. I understand that at 3.5 hours the movie is already long enough as it is, but that scene removal doesn’t really work and it would only be 1 or 2 extra minutes.
The only other edit I don’t quite think worked was the movement of the Harry and Dumbledore moment. I was fine with the removal of Narcissa in the forest scene, but putting the King’s Cross moment right after the school sees Harry dead just kills the pacing. The movie is building up to a crescendo and then it just stops mid-track and then when it picks up again it’s too sudden. I think the original placement is better.
Despite my complaints, this is probably the best of the Revisited edits. It’s really ambitious in what it’s trying to do and almost all of it works. That there were only 3 moments in the edit where I felt there were some poor choices shows that the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. The only other negative I have to say is that the visual quality of the edit wasn’t always the best. Specifically, in some of the really dark scenes, I noticed a lot of grain and noise in the image, although it could just be the video software I’m running on my computer. I’ll definitely download the 4k version once that’s done. I think this is probably the best edit of Deathly Hallows and while I had some issues I can’t recommend this enough.