Harry Potter and writing Evil

I had a hard time watching the last four Harry Potter films. I've already read the books, and so I know what happens. All that remains to be seen is the creative execution, much of which is obviously CGI. There are some arty camera angles and silent moments, but the fundamental narrative does not deviate from the books. In fact, it mostly cuts out stuff from the books, due to movie time limits.

What you are left with is a teen drama about dating and school and stuff, and some really bad two-dimensional villains who basically cackle and do evil stuff that no one could really justify. The wonder of the magical universe is what drove the popularity of the books, clever things like hidden passageways, broomstick sports, newspapers with moving type. Such wonder seemed better on the page as opposed to the screen. Maybe because it was described in such a clever way in the books. And because CGI takes the wonder out of special effects. 

Voldemort is 2-dimensional. Rowling herself didn't really know much about Voldemort. He was created in order to give Harry a foil. A foil, by the way, is an interesting analogy. When I think foil I think airfoil, which on an airplane shapes the wind around it in order to lift it up higher. The analogy would then be that the narrative actually should center around the villain, not the hero, who is always scrambling to meet the machinations of the villain.

And so we see Harry Potter scrambling to stop the evil of Voldemort. The thing about Voldemort is that his motivations are kind of undeveloped. I get the sense that the final two books, especially the bit about Voldemort having 7 horocruxes that need to be destroyed, was sort of JK Rowling scrambling to come up with an explanation for the bad guy she created but didn't understand in the first book. 

But what annoys me is how bad the motivations are. Why is he going around killing people? Well, it doesn't really say. There's something about him being a racist, that unforgivable sin, something about him simply being a murderer, which would then make you wonder about how he got so many to follow him. The thing is, while Rowling says that she based Voldemort off of some of the most evil men in the 20th century, Hitler and Stalin, she seems to have a cartoon understanding of the two. She doesn't really understand the circumstances leading to them. The extreme poverty and injustice that they wanted to combat with their own peculiar ideologies. In JK Rowling's universe, everyone has everything they need, and so we're left with evil for the sake of evil. 

It's a very British thing, actually, isn't it? To ignore the injustice from say, taxes for a magical prep school. Instead to focus on some way the bad guy is inhumane and use that to justify the status quo.