The climatic movie for a franchise that spread over a decade. Even if the film’s didn’t always satisfy the fans of the book, and each movie is home to its own share of problems that keeps them from being up their with the fantasy epics like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, it deserve praise for bringing this form of saga storytelling back into the spotlight and bringing a popular novel series to life in a way that appeared to satisfy a mass majority. And so, it ends with the final battle of Hogwarts in Deathly Hallows Part II. Set immediately after the end of the first part, the main trio, Harry, Ron and Hermione (played by Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson) continue their search in finding the horcruxes of Voldemort (played by Ralph Fiennes) discovering that the last remaining ones are in Hogwarts. Returning to their old school and discovering how dangerous and evil it’s become, Harry and his group, along with the remaining students and teachers of the school prepare for battle against the Voldemort’s army. While the war wagers on outside, Harry must destroy the final horcruxes as to kill Voldemort at his most vulnerable, although its discovered that the last horcrux will be the most difficult one to destroy. As the climatic finale to the franchise, it manages to deliver everything that people would want to see for the final movie. Essentially being an all-out war picture, it displays the extreme action along with the character’s conclusion honestly better than many other movies in the franchise has done previously. The movie is still home to its standard issues, but with the final hour before the close, many have been thrown away with the tide and instead embrace the side that everyone wants to see, a wizard’s war.

The narrative, even though the film has two parts under its belt, feels a bit cramped and smushed together. With a pretty uneventful and misplaced bank steal and exit scene during the beginning, the movie immediately switches over to the battle of Hogwarts, where the movie spends most of its time and basis its whole climax around.  Even though the task of finding and destroying horcruxes was evident in the first half with only one being destroyed, that feels a little weaker when the remaining four are quickly destroyed in this one. If this plot device was known sooner and each one was spread out between its destruction, the race for the final kill would have been that more intense. Even though the movie could have benefitted from the previous movie’s actually building up better to this, the actual fight at Hogwarts is legitimately pretty cool. It feels genuinely big and stressful, it has a weight and feeling of doom surrounding it, and it doesn’t keep everything safe and friendly, people do die in this movie, not many of importance and not many that are treated with the appropriate build up, screen time, or purpose, but it still takes that next step in showing the consequences of this battle. The director, David Yates, has been with the movies for a long time now so he knows how to direct a scene correctly, and how long each scene should go on for, outside again from the opening act, but the battle at Hogwarts is one of the film’s strongest highlights. Granted the last third of the film gets pretty dull; while the middle of the movie is pretty impressive with great pacing, a good mixture between the battles and the story-driven elements, and features a lot of great moments including a very interesting backstory from one of the characters, once all that clears and the final battle commences, it’s not nearly as impressive and largely underwhelming, along with a notably cheesy and downright unrealistic ending.

The characters come to their conclusions in perfectly fine ways, though it’s hard to say that any of them felt earned as the movies never build any of them up to have conclusive arcs or even development whatsoever. Harry is given a pretty cool reasoning for his scar, but that still doesn’t taken away how bland he is, Ron and Hermione get together even though they have no chemistry, and most of the others are barley more than side characters so if the main character had no progression, the side ones definitely don’t. The only one who seems to buck that trend is Neville played by Matthew Lewis. Even from the first movie, he has always been one of the better actors of the franchise, and though not contributing much he has been a memorable part of these movies, second only to the Weasley twins, again actors with actual chemistry and good deliveries. In this movie, he is given a bigger role and does a pretty good job in it especially towards the end. Draco is set up for a redemption, but it goes nowhere so his purpose throughout the whole franchise seems wasted. One of the sourest elements is the villain himself; Voldemort is not an interesting villain, he’s every fantasy bad guy with a magic wand, his design is boring, his motivation is never stated, he has no character, and even if Ralph Fiennes is giving it his all, it doesn’t improve a badly written character. Even the acting is a bit more standard than usual; while in the first half of this finale, it felt like the main three got a bit better at handling some of the heavier stuff, here it’s right back to the standard trying but awkward deliveries everyone’s used too.

The movie is using far more effects in this one than most of the others as not only is this the first movie where a majority of the movie is the action, but it’s also the one with the most cinematic look to it. While usually the spells looking and acting like bullets used to be bland and bereft of creativity, here the camera work and fast pace actually helps the scene feel even more epic. Its acted and shot like an actual war battle, and many scenes feel legitimately tense because of how well the shots are constructed to look, from sweeping shots in the sky, to on-the-ground low shots witnessing the fires above. The movie does still have some big visual moments that are more impressive than in previous ones and it helps this final movie feel like the biggest one. Some of the music pieces are legitimately good; though not as memorable as other pieces made for some of the movies, the sombre tracks used for the emotional scenes make them feel more impactful than they normally would and even in the action packed scenes, it makes them feel that more desperate. The writing gets a little more unfocused as a lot of plot elements are added in and rearranged last minute to make something work later on, taking away any consistency that this franchise had to begin with.

At its final moments, Harry Potter knew that it had to go out with a bang. Even if the trail to the end could have been a lot clear, more interesting, better pasted together, and featured a lot more engaging material, just before the finish line they took everything that they mostly set-up and delivered it in a surprisingly entertaining way, satisfying most that saw it. True for a climax to eight movies, the threat could have been much stronger, and the ending could have been a lot less sappy, for a franchise as rocky as this, with solid directing, great cinematography, and memorable and cool-looking action, it still produced something that generations will still know about years later. The end of a franchise done in a surprisingly good way, the final goodbye to Hogwarts is weirdly enough not keeping their children far away from the child-killing school, but the true irony is that it killed off more people than the climactic battle of Game of Thrones. For potter fans and even casual moviegoers, check it out and watch the magic end in a big way.