Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 2001
In some ways it was a lose-lose proposition. Millions of people have read the book and would demand that it be true to the book and their imaginations. But to stay true to a book means the movie has to be 12 hours long or leave out a lot of information. I really wonder what I would have thought of this if I hadn’t read the book already.
But I did read the book. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie so faithful to a book before. Very little seemed to be left out and everything was realized well whether it was the owls delivering mail or the characters, like Alan Rickman as Snape. Harry’s friend, Hermione, actually brought more to the character than the book. In the movie she’s a lot less like Dennis the Menace’s Margaret. That’s encouraging because there are enough stereotypes where smart girls have to be losers.
Though there are a lot of parts of the movie that looked very computer generated, this is still a great example of a movie being able to pull off just about anything that someone can imagine without resorting to animation. That includes giant 3-headed dogs, talking snakes, and the entire sport of Quidditch. In that way this movie really shows what the future of movies can be like.
I have a few minor quibbles with the realization of the book. Hagrid needed to be a little stupider (in the book he’s very cockney, but here he talked about like everyone else) and I thought the fancy new brooms would actually look modern, especially something called a Nimbus 2000. And I would agree with what many say about Harry being the weak link. Too often he had to look awestruck or amazed at something that you know well he couldn’t actually see when shooting the scene and it comes off as fake. He did his lines well enough though.
The movie also seemed kind of mechanical as it raced through all the different parts of the book, but part of that is because the book was sort of the same way. Or maybe because I knew what was coming.
I would have graded the book itself a B- probably. By fleshing out a lot of the things in the book, the movie is actually better. Plus I think that because the movie is a condensation of the book that it can pack more punch. I suppose I’ll give this one an A-.
Owned on: Digital