Look at this image.

What do you see?

a) The symbol of the Deathly Hallows.

b) A penis in a tent.

If your answer is ‘a’, congratulations, you’re more mature than the average Cambridge audience. If your answer is ‘b’, please read on.

Watching this film was akin to catching your parents making out: horrifying, hilarious, tragic, and you can’t look away. The attempt to generate touching moments of sexual tension between the adolescent characters (see unnecessary dress-zipping, awkward dance scene, and naked make-out vision) was desperately heavy-handed but provided welcome comic relief from the stagnant storyline. These elements unintentionally redeemed what was a transparent money-making gimmick, and kept the packed cinema in stitches.

Highlights of the film included numerous encounters with Daniel Radcliffe’s pasty, pudgy, hairy torso; a bizarre description of the light in Ron’s chest that dropped him deus-ex-machinally back into the story; and some lovely shots of the Forest of Dean. We could bore you with a list of ways in which this film deviated from the usual Potter formula and is therefore more mature/edgy/original but honestly we would have liked to have seen Hogwarts (we would have liked a plot even more.)

The sparkly array of stock British actors couldn’t breathe life into a script that uncomfortably fused a coming-of-age drama, an action flick, and a camping instruction video. After almost two hours of flaccid teen angst, Mr. Lovegood’s drawing of the Hallows was the last straw for an audience that had given up trying to take it seriously.

Let’s face it, Deathly Hallows Part 1 should never have existed. If all 896 pages of the The Order of the Phoenix could be packed into a 138-minute film, why should it take twice the time to get through Hallows’ 784 pages? The answer is quite obviously that this is prom night and David Yates is the queen who doesn’t want the fairytale to end because out there in the real world the only jobs she gets are made-for-TV movies. Nevertheless, if DH1 was directorial throat-clearing, we look forward to the phlegm projectile that will be DH2!