Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Review
by Shane Burridge (sburridge AT hotmail DOT com)December 10th, 2001
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) 152m
Hype really does make it harder to enjoy a movie. At the most basic level, it is the buildup of expectation that may let the film down, but there are other responses that media saturation can bring: the most obvious is that the film in question is pumped up and celebrated so much by its producers that you come to resent it before even catching a look at it; and in some cases, a movie that you might have been interested in seeing during its pre-production phase becomes just too popular an event, mutating into the sort of thing that you don't want to see not only because "everyone" is seeing it, but because they are expected to see it.
In HARRY POTTER's case, it was the media's witless catch-cries of "Potty Over Potter" and "They're Just Wild About Harry" , coupled with the U.S. market's irrelevant retitling of 'Philosopher's Stone' to 'Sorcerer's Stone' that I found most offputting (I don't suffer fools and bylines gladly) but the arrival of the staggeringly banal tag on the movie poster - "Journey Beyond Your Imagination" - nearly had me boycott the film on principle alone (J K Rowling wrote the source material: the only thing the marketing geniuses had to do was think of one lousy line for a poster, and all they could come up with was a hack phrase that was not only conceptually accurate but also ironically devoid of any imagination). Besides all of this, I wasn't in any particular rush to see the film - I'd read the books and had pretty much 'seen the movie' in my mind already. There was also the issue of Chris Columbus as director. This is the same man who just can't help dolloping sentiment into his movies for the sake of an audience response. The director of STEPMOM and NINE MONTHS doing HARRY POTTER? Insert shudder here. But then again, Columbus started out with an edge when he wrote GREMLINS and THE GOONIES, and when I'd heard that Rowling had insisted on an all-British cast and was on hand during filming for 'quality control' I began to concede that the film might be worth seeing after all.
But if any of the above reasons weren't enough to deter would-be ticket buyers, there was also the make-a-movie-of-a-phenomenon stigma that had attached itself to the film. HARRY POTTER, however, is born of a different type of mania. Unlike POKEMON, STAR WARS, BATMAN, or every other pop culture juggernaut that has been fabricated into a movie over the last couple of decades, HARRY POTTER has a more upmarket lineage: not of comics or video games or cartoons, but honest-to-goodness books. Yes, POTTER is born of literature, and for once the media obviously felt that it was justified in contributing to the hoopla, as evidenced by an interminable onslaught of bimbos and newsreaders (they prefer the term 'journalists', but it ain't gonna happen) gleefully informing us of such insights that "books are cool again!" and kids with glasses are no longer "nerds" (they would do well to remember that the very children whose praises they are singing are going to be the same ones who'll be skeptical of everything they say on TV in the years to come).
In similar vein, you'd have to assume that the average Harry Potter/J K Rowling fan would be among the more informed of their contemporaries, and likely to view the film a little more critically than most other PG-fare. The London premiere was host to a throng of such fans, all pressed waist-high against the railings and enthusiastically clutching their copies of different Harry Potter volumes. Obviously any of these kids would have given their eye teeth to get into this showing, but they had to make do with watching less deserving personalities stroll up the red carpet in their stead ("Nah, I haven't read the book" Cher informed a TV cameraman while swishing past in a thousand dollars worth of sparkles, even though it's only a children's book and she could have read the freakin' thing on the plane over).
Are these reasons not to see the film? No, they're just preconceptions, and the point of this spiel is to voice the doubts that several potential viewers may be sharing and, having done so, erase them. Forget the hype, ignore the commercial exploitation, wipe the slate clean and see HARRY POTTER for what it is: a jolly good adventure that can be enjoyed by all ages. Foremost among the movie's achievements is its adherence to the book: the tone is right, the pacing is right, and most significantly, the look is right. The film-makers have somehow managed to tap into a collective subconscious and portray the book in the way that most people would probably visualize it. This not only includes the locations and sets, but also the characters - it will be hard to read Harry Potter again without seeing Robbie Coltrane's Hagrid or Maggie Smith's MacGonagall peering out from among the pages. But it's Alan Rickman who steals the show in as Harry's ambiguous foe Professor Snape: by speaking in a low, fruity gurgle and keeping his face almost immobile for the whole movie he turns underacting into some kind of overacting, or vice versa. Harry's friends Ron and Hermione don't translate to the screen as effectively, but Daniel Radcliffe fits the title role effortlessly: I'd always felt the hero of the books was quite an anonymous character despite - or probably because of - his constant presence throughout the stories, but Radcliffe is both personable and believable (Harry's distracting scar is sensibly covered up by his hair during the movie).
It has probably escaped the attention of most people that subsequent films in the HARRY POTTER series (paralleling the series of books) will come under a different sort of scrutiny. The first film inevitably bears the burden of being compared with Harry Potter in print; the others will inherit this to some degree but will also be compared to the previous movies. Ironically, the success of adapting the first novel has only made things more difficult for the film-makers from this point on. Future adaptations will need some judicious editing to work effectively as films, as Rowling expands upon a ritualistic formula throughout her series. We've already seen the Dursleys, Diagon Alley, the train trip, the sorting hat ceremony, the quidditch game (one of the film's highlights), et al: there's no need to see these repeated when there is so much new material within the other stories. I would hope that the film-makers believe they have proven themselves this first time around and don't treat the remaining books as some kind of Holy Writ that must be followed verbatim to avoid the wrath of Rowling's fans (the length of the fourth book, 'Goblet of Fire' has brought speculation that the film version may have to be released in two parts, but in truth there is much extraneous matter that can be trimmed without hurting the story). It's going to be tough. Audiences don't want the next one to be just as good: they want it better.
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