A big, Harry to-do

PREVIEW REVIEW: Welcome back, Potter — it's the final countdown

LINKS / FRESHNESS RATING: Watch the last Harry Potter trailer ever / This post contains avada kedavra level SPOILERS for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

In terms of pop culture time, which is sort of like geologic time, I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows about 100 years ago. And like most people who were hanging out somewhere at midnight on the first day of sales, I read the entire book in a few days and didn't read to process so much as to tick off the various mini-climaxes and get to the big showdown. I remember a wedding. There's a lot of wandering in the forest. We get a couple of surprise betrayals (et tu, Luna Lovegood's dad?), as well as a tearful goodbye or three (we hardly knew thee, Dobby). It turns out that Dumbledore fishes off the witches' end of the pier. (Or maybe that was a wholesale invention sprung on readers after the fact that's not supported by A SINGLE WORD OR SENTENCE in the entire seven books. I don't quite remember.) Ron chickens out, then chickens back in; Neville Longbottom leads the resistance at Hogwarts; Snape maintains plausible deniability. Harry crosses over, then crosses back, then suddenly has kids of his own. Somewhere in there, Voldemort finally got good and mort, once and for all. The end.

I know there's a ton of stuff that I'm not remembering. If the final trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is anything to go by, however, then either most of the story was already covered in Deathly Hallows, Part 1, or else, well, shoot there's only time for so many details when you're adapting a single novel into nearly five hours of cinema. What I'm getting from the trailer is that there's a bit of Harry, Hermione and Ron breaking in at Gringotts to snag one of the horcruxes, and then — bam! — Team Harry vs. Team Voldy at Hogwarts. I mean, they definitely checked off the wedding and the camping trip in Part I, and Dobby went to ride with the Valkyries in House Elf Valhalla, but did the filmmakers really have nothing left except for Gringotts and Custer's Hogwarts's Last Stand?

I can't say that I'm thrilled about the prospect of the Potter peeps attempting to outdo the length/scope of the siege of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers (as envisioned by Peter Jackson). Watching scene after dimly lit scene of orc horde target practice has its own set of problems, but wizard battles are even more visually static than siege engines in the rain. It's all fireballs and bolts of energy, unless two wizards are fighting, in which case it's even more lethargic. There are two or three cuts in the trailer of Harry and Voldemort "dueling," which is to say that they point their wands at each other, the wands emit color coded streams of lightning that meet in the middle, and then the combatants make "morning after Thanksgiving dinner"-level poop faces while they grunt and strain and try to ... what, exactly? Push the other guy over backward?

The most confounding part of the trailer, though, has got to be the What-the-Helga-Hufflepuff?! inclusion of what sure looks like a moment that's intended to have the "Fill your hands!" resonance of the Long Kiss Goodnight to the Big V. Dirty Harry gives ol' He Who Must Not, Etc., his coldest stare and snarls, "Come on, Tom. Let's finish this the way we started it. TOGETHER!" What happens next is probably something that you shouldn't watch if you want to maintain any level of suspense about How They Chose To End It. Is Radcliffe doing a line from the book there? It didn't have the ring of familiarity to it, but my memory of stuff that happened 100 years ago is admittedly spotty. There's not a high bar here. The prior films have sorta been all over the map, but I personally think Deathly Hallows, Part I is the worst of them. It wouldn't have taken much for me to exit the series on a high note, but if I've already seen the biggest cut from the grand finale, then I'm just going to be angry. Don't make me angry, David Yates. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.