Ahem. Folks, the original offending post is now in spoiler tags. You're not beating a dead horse here, you're beating a friggin' extinct horse.
May I suggest that, in the future:
1) Everyone try to give adequate warning before being the first person to post spoilers in a thread, and
2) If you're going to ask someone to warn about spoilers, you do it in a polite and friendly fashion, and
3) We drop this discussion in this thread, and continue discussing the movie?
Cuz I wanna talk about the movie.
I hated the first movie. Loathed it, despised it, sneered at it, dreaded seeing it the second time. (Stupid no-good promises made to my young cousins! grumble grumble). So I didn't see the second movie, got no desire to see the second movie.
I was delighted by this one. One reviewer said that it was the first one in the franchise to be an actual real live
movie, and that encapsulated my feelings about it.
Sure, a huge amount of stuff was excised. Hardly any Quidditch, no Christmas feast, no end-of-year feast, etc. I was very glad about that. Whereas the first movie felt to me like a frenetic grocery-list of Scenes From the Book, this one, by ignoring the fifty bajillion mandatory subplots from the source material, was able to take its time in the telling of the central story. It was able to draw some senes out lazily, was able to luxuriate in particularly nice visuals, and was just a lot of fun.
Spoilers ahead.
I had two problems with this movie, which is why I only ranked it an 8:
1) Poor Daniel Radcliffe still can't act his way out of a paper bag. This wouldn't be so noticeable, except that his two young co-stars have gotten very good at their jobs, while Radcliffe is incapable of showing any intensity of emotion--like Keanu Reeves, he tries to substitute shouting for passion, and it irks me. I very much ope he improves, because he seems like a nice kid, and I want to like him; but his flatness in several key scenes removed me from the action.
2) I really wish they'd taken the time to explain about Daddy Potter's Patronus. It's a key scene in the story. I almost wonder if Radcliffe couldn't achieve the complex combination of joy, grief, pride, and wonder necessary for the scene, and so Cuaron nixed it rather than put an unsatisfactory version on screen.
Still and all, the movie was very entertaining.
Daniel