a disappointing conclusion to a memorable series

Despite this being the big, grand finale of the Harry Potter series, it honestly didn't feel much bigger than any of the other films in the series. It had a lot of action, but it never really felt big or epic. We see a lot of spells and explosions go off, but they feel more like background noise than anything. We never get the sense that this is the be all, end all finale to the series, as we hardly see the battle ourselves. The movie just breezes by all the action to focus primarily on the trio's journey and while that's commendable, it also makes the film feel incredibly small.

This really should've been more like Return of the King or Avengers: Endgame in scope, with bigger, more lavish action sequences than anything we've seen before. There should've been plenty of moments for fans to cheer for the characters they grew up watching all these years but instead, David Yates directs it all in that typically unspectacular manner of his, where scale and grandness is all but feigned. In return, what we get is a film that starts off really well and opens with a lot of promise, only to merely leave the audience adequately satisfied in the end.

That's how I felt anyway.