Recently, I found an article by John Orr of A+E Interactive. While his thoughts on the newest Harry Potter film are slightly more critical than mine, there was one sentence in his article that I think encompasses what worries me about Deathly Hallows 1 and 2:

“[W]e are stuck with director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves, who, sadly, both seem to think they are way smarter than Rowling.

So much of what went wrong with Half-Blood Prince were things that were wonderful in the books and tweaked into nonrecognition by the filmmakers. And some of the great nuggets of scenes that were cut out (the Muggle President scene and the Dursley’s, for instance) would have been so much better than the scenes they added (like the Bridge attack and the attack on the Burrow). It does look like they believe the changes are improvements when they just aren’t up to par for me. These are things I mentioned in my review, but I can’t help but get nervous that these same filmmakers will make the same mistakes on the last two films.

The one thing Potter book fans have going for them is the splitting of the story into two films. By having twice as much time to tell the story, my hope is that they’ll keep in as much of the stuff from the book as possible. While that doesn’t guarentee they’ll stay faithful to Rowling’s writing, they won’t have the old excuse, “There just wasn’t enough time.”