Don’t gasp too loudly. I’m going to post. Radical! As it hasn’t been done on here for quite a while. But hopefully the posting will increase a little more.

Last week Z and I went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II. I’m sure this will not be the first nor the last review of this movie. But you can read it anyway.
We waited in line for seven hours. I couldn’t help but spend some of the time watching people. Teenagers and young adults were the primary people in line. Why would anyone in their right mind, stand in line for seven hours, talking about a made up world. It was an odd experience. We were surrounded by people who, as far as I knew, had nothing else in common but that we knew who Harry Potter was, who he was fighting, and why. Cloaked wizards wandered around, people brandished wands saying things like “accio ticket” and “Expelliarmus.”  And whole discussions were had on Arabella Figg, and horcruxes. How could a whole generation be be-spelled by such a thing? This was the question I was asking myself. And then, I watched the last movie.

And I knew. The Harry Potter phenomena (the books and the movies) are not about Nimbus 2000s and Fizzing Whizzbees. They are not about dragons and hippogriffs. They are not even about Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore. Although all of these things are a part of it. Harry Potter is about honor and shame. Friendship and family. Integrity and power. Hope and giving up. Cowardice and courage. In short you might say they are about good and evil.

This last movie fulfilled the spirit of the books, and the series. Those characteristics I mentioned, were there in that movie, and of course in the book it was based off of, completing the true nature of the series.  For me, the scene that summed it all up was when Voldermort revels in the death of Harry and asks those in Hogwarts to surrender. Draco switches sides and then later as the fighting breaks up runs away with his parents. But Neville! (The same boy who loses his Remembrall in the first book, provides Harry with gillyweed in the fourth, and is discovered to have almost been Voldermort’s downfall if things had been different in the sixth book.) Neville stands up to Voldermort with the most courage that any Gryffindor could show, and honor beyond doubt, and in the moment without hope, he voices that hope and through his courage makes that very hope possible. That is what Harry Potter is about. Is it any wonder that the series has captured millions? I think not. And so, I rediscovered, why exactly, I had waited for seven hours to watch a movie.