Two Part Films

This year, there are two franchises that happen to be splitting their final chapter into two films.  The first is the now theatrically and home video released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  The second is the soon to be coming Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn.  This is an interesting trend.  These aren’t the only stories to be broken into multiple parts.  Does it work to do this?  Sometimes.  Other times, it can handicap a film.

Throughout this, I’m mostly going to use Harry Potter as an example for what I think can go wrong with this sort of thing.  It’s not a dig against the series as a whole, or even the two final instalments when put together.  I like them.  The method used to present them to me is where the problem lies and I will explain why.

The main fault lies within the story itself.  If we look back upon the entirety of the Harry Potter series, there is an overarching story to be found.  Then each movie has its own story to be told.  Except for the final two.  Together they tell one story.  Apart, each film only tells half of a story which deteriorates from the power that the story could have over the viewers.  Especially when there is a 6 to 10 month gap in between.  This is the case with both the Harry Potter and the Twilight films.  They are breaking the films apart and releasing them with a relatively large gap between two films that are part of the same overall film.

I know that you may think that upon video release you may be able to see the whole story told at once, but that is not my point.  My point here is that upon initial release, you only get half of a story and must then wait months to get the rest.  You received no closure upon watching the initial film and have not yet reached the climax.  The first film has built up to nothing really.  What is the point?

You could argue that serialized television does the same thing.  They break up one story into multiple episodes.  There is a difference to this, however.  Most television shows that do serialized stories still have an arc, however minor, that is each episode’s plot.  There is a destination that each episode must get to.  There is a beginning, a middle, and an end.  In the case of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, you get a beginning and a middle.  In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, you get more middle, you get the climax, and you get the end.  This is not the same way that serialized television is set up.  You might get the middle of the overall season arc but you commonly also get a character arc for an episode.  There are also multiple arcs at play in a serialized format that allow for this sort of separation of arcs between episodes to work.

Onto my next issue that I am seeing in these two part films, or at least in the Harry Potter two parter.  There are certain plot points that are extended and others that are reduced for time in each film.  Since each film had to come in at relatively the same length, and there was a certain plot point that the film makers wanted to hit for the end of the first film, it feels like they extended many of the moments in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 in order to get the length right and get to that plot point at the right time.  Then, because they needed the same length for the second film and they had so much more substance after the plot point, they had to remove some essential aspects of the film including some death scenes for key characters.  Yes, we know they died but I would at least have liked to know the where, when, why, and how of the matter, or just a little bit more than that they died.  They were key characters in the main characters’ lives.  But they couldn’t include them due to time constraints.

Yes, if they had kept the movie as one film, they would have also been submitted to time constraints.  The film would have likely been an hour to an hour and a half shorter than the two combined.  I’m happy with that though.  It would allow for the people behind the film to not be as slavish to the material and to fit everything that was necessary without fitting in a bunch of filler scenes.

In the end, it all comes down to the feel of the movies themselves.  Half of a story, like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, leaves you on a note that feels abrupt.  That’s because you only have half of a story.  The arc for that story has not yet ended so you don’t feel satisfied in that way.  A movie needs its own arc to feel somewhat complete.  Look at Che for example.  Che is another film that was broken into two parts.  Overall it is the story of the rise and fall of Che Guevara in the revolutionary political world.  When cut into its two parts, each part of the story has its own individual arc.  One is of a successful uprising in Cuba from the inception of the rebels to Castro gaining power.  The other half tells of Che moving to, I think, Bolivia to try and create a similar revolution and how things didn’t work out as well as in Cuba.  Overall it has a story arc.  Individually, each part has a story arc.  Each part of the two part film feels whole.  It does not feel like you are getting half of a story, even though you are.  It feels like you are getting a full story with another full story, which you also are.

Like I said at the beginning, there can be good two part films or bad two part films.  It all depends on how the film maker fits the film around the story and whether the transition between the two is hampered through poor story telling.  In the case of Harry Potter, halving the final instalment into two parts may have seemed like a good idea initially, and monetarily it was a good idea, but in a storytelling sense, the films were hurt by the method.  In the case of Che, when the story is set right so that there are two individual arcs that set up the overall arc, the films can work in magnificent ways.  It all comes down to the plotting.