Wands at the ready, Harry Potter fans. It's time to duel again.
Friday's release of the penultimate Potter pic is a cinematic retelling of the first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The epic length of the full film, which has been split inyo two parts, allowed director David Yates to stick closer to the way events unfold in the books than he did with Half-Blood Prince.
This should please the more-fastidious Potter fans. Even so, everyone who's read the books has their own idea of how Harry's last big adventure went down, and they're liable to disagree over the ways Deathly Hallows: Part 1 brings the book to the screen.
As Wired.com's resident Harry Potter addict, I bring you the five things that I think will cause the most fan fights.
Warning: Big, big spoilers ahead.
Harry and Hermione Make Out Naked
If you are the sort of person who reads smutty Harry-Hermione fan fiction, a still from this scene is going to be your desktop background for at least the next 12 months. If you're a parent who unwittingly took a 5-year-old to see the PG-13 Deathly Hallows (and you didn't walk out after the brutal murder in the first 10 minutes), you can't say you weren't warned: This scene is in the book!
Oh, sure, it's just Voldemort's Horcrux coming to life and playing on Ron Weasley's deepest fears and insecurities, but, hey, his loss is our gain. The thing he least wants to see is worth the extra $5 for an Imax ticket.
Harry and Hermione Dance Platonically
This scene, showing Harry and Hermione dancing in a friendly 6th-grade-dance, Christian-side-hug sort of manner to a Nick Cave song, is significantly tamer than what the old friends do in Ron's nightmares. It'll still probably infuriate a certain sort of person because – horrors – it's not in the book!
Heaven forbid a movie use a uniquely visual technique to illustrate the depth of the seven-year friendship between two of its central characters. How dare they take out the scene in Luna Lovegood's bedroom only to add this!
The Tale of the 3 Brothers
This pivotal bit of magical history is also in the Deathly Hallows book, not to mention in J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard. In the movie, it's told as computer-generated puppet kabuki.
To be honest, it's pretty cool. I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't like it, except some people are probably going to be up in arms that they didn't cast three more giants of British cinema to appear on-screen for all of two seconds each to play the three Peverell brothers.
Dobby
Of all the characters who buy the farm in Deathy Hallows, Dobby's death is either the most painful or the most overdue, depending on your point of view. Some people out there probably wouldn't care if Voldemort had offed Harry at the end of the movie just as long as the plucky, can-do house elf with a taste for freedom and a heart of gold also bit the big one.
Yeah, well, you heartless jerks can shove it. I love Dobby, even his cloying tendency to refer to himself in the third person. He goes all Yoda-in-Clone Wars for his big final scene – a hero's exit if ever there was one.
The Answer to the Most Important Question Ever
What are Voldemort's Horcruxes? What's Dumbledore's dark secret? Whose side is Snape on, anyway?
Who cares! Deathly Hallows may answer all these pressing questions, but there's only one thing we ever really needed to know after 10 years of books: boxers or briefs?
As it turns out, none of the above; Harry exclusively wears black boxer briefs. This is probably for the best, as actor Daniel Radcliffe has to get almost-naked a couple of times in this movie, and anything more revealing would have edged Deathly Hallows up to a soft R.
That said, the canonical, you-can't-argue-it revelation of Harry's choice of underwear will probably send many fan-fiction authors back to do hasty rewrites. It's a tough old world, isn't it?
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