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Yes, the point of the last scene of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 was to bring a closure to the lives of the three wiz kids that we have been following over the last decade.
No, the Nineteen Years Later part did not work for me in the book and the last scene in the film did not make me like it any better.
When you’ve seen Harry, Ron and Hermione as tiny tots and watched them grow up through the films to become teenagers, the giant leap to when they are 30-somethings just doesn’t work, especially visually.
I won’t lie, I was waiting to see how David Yates would pull it off and I wasn’t disappointed — about my anticipated disappointment, that is.
As a Harry Potter fan who has watched every film over a dozen times, I really did not want to see them age. It was hard to imagine while reading, it was even harder to accept seeing the resilient teenagers of a moment earlier turn into really dowdy 37-year-olds.
They definitely looked older than any 37-year-old I’ve seen, except for Ginny and Hermione who hadn’t seemed to age at all. But all of them looked like weary grown-ups and nothing like you would expect (okay, make that hope) the spunky kids to grow up to be. I mean Harry’s mentors Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and others like Molly Weasley, who were, I’m sure, older than 37, had more spirit in them than Harry, Ron and Hermione showed in that last scene.
Also, since the point of the flash forward was to show how all the characters had taken to life without Voldemort and since Yates had not hesitated to go beyond the book on several occasions he perhaps could have used the information J.K. Rowling had let out later — that Harry and Ron were now aurors, Hermione worked in the department of Magical Law Enforcement, and Neville was a professor at Hogwarts — to make the epilogue that much more worthwhile.
What actually did work, thanks to Yate’s attention to detail, and made the last scene worth something was the final sequence. Harry’s son Albus Severus Potter looks out of the window of the Hogwarts Express, Harry looks on from Platform 9¾ and we see a Chocolate Frog (a toffee) leap onto the window just like one had on Harry’s first journey on the Hogwarts Express.
Yes, life and we come full circle.
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When I read the book, I really loved it. The way Rowling wrote about Harry and his friends growing up and the way they handle their kids made for a very interesting read. But the film left me thirsty because it felt short on detail. There was just a scene about the children who are sent away. I didn’t like that. I wish there were some more details about them.
— Churni Ganguly, Actress
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The whole 19-years-later episode did not work for me at all. I did not like it in the book, and it was absolutely awful in the film. I found it completely unnecessary to show the three settled in domesticity. It was so predictable especially after that grand face-off. Also, it was so disgusting how they actually had the same faces but Ron had a beer belly and everyone was so depressingly boring to look at. I think they should have never made the 19-years-later bit.
— Sriyanka Ray, Student, Jadavpur University
