Let me start by saying this chapter of the Harry Potter saga did a lot of the same things that the last few movies did well, the stuff that has been going on since (the genius) Alfonso Cuaron took the franchise in a new and much more compelling direction following Chris Columbus' first two kiddie movies. The atmosphere was perfect, it was beautifully shot and stunning visually, and competently acted; I especially enjoyed the soft spoken creepiness of Ray Fiennes' Voldemort and the overtop, couldn't be further from Queen Elizabeth, craziness of Helena Bonham Carter's Bellatrix Lestrange. All in all it's just a well-made film. There was also one creative sequence that I loved -- the retelling of the story of the deathly hallows, with Hermione's narration and stick figure animation, was just awesomely creative and captivating, and exponentially better than the typical flashback scene one might expect.
However, there were several things I didn't like. Full disclosure first, it's been 4 years since I read the book, and while I loved it at the time, I don't really remember it that well (especially the first half, aka this movie) and haven't thought about it a whole lot in the interim. So I don't remember if it was so blatant in the book or not but it was just an all too convenient plot device that all Harry, Ron, and Hermione had to do to escape even the most perilous predicament was simply grasp hands and disapparate to where ever they wanted. Maybe it's a necessary feature in this type of story but the ease of the trio's getaways grated on my nerves while watching the movie in a way that didn't happen at all while I was reading the book.
Furthermore, along similar lines of HP7 coming dangerously close to typical action genre pitfalls, there were a couple moments that felt so derivative that it was almost like I was experiencing deja vu. First, when they flashed back to Dumbledore falling to his death from the Hogwarts tower, it looked so much like Gandalf's fall in the mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring (white hair flowing in the wind and everything) that I honestly forgot what movie I was watching for a split second. And then in the Harry transportation scene (which was actually pretty well done, other than Mad Eye's death basically being reduced to an off hand comment that was seemingly forgotten 5 seconds later), when Voldemort keyed in on the real Harry, I could've sworn they just used stock footage from LOST and Voldemort transformed into the smoke monster for a few seconds. Now I love both Lord of the Rings and LOST but I don't love when I feel like they're being copied. It was only two small and relatively insignificant moments but it played into a broader feeling of unoriginality and an overall lack of freshness (which is a bit inevitable in the 7th movie of a franchise I guess).
Lastly, I'm still a little irritated they made this into two movies in the first place. The studio's excuse that the story demands 2 films, blah blah blah, is taking the easy way out in my opinion. The wandering through the woods part of the book was a bit drawn out as it was so when you're adapting it into a movie, why not cut that down instead of expand it even more and center an entire movie on it? No need to answer that since it isn't exactly rocket science -- the studio is going making hundreds of millions of dollars by making two movies instead of one. So the bottom line for me was Part 1 was mostly just a setup, a beautifully shot and immaculately crafted setup but a setup nonetheless, for the finale. I'm still confident Part 2 will be incredible (it'd take some doing to really screw that part of the story up) but I have tempered my enthusiasm ever so slightly.
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