Real improvement on the first movie

Rating: 8/10 (8 August 2004)

Well, I was quite pleasantly surprised with Harry Potter II. Like LOTR, I thought the first movie got off to a visually terrific start, but then got progressively bogged down for one reason or another.
To an extent 'Chamber of Secrets' suffers from the same problem, but in this case the first half hour isn't just visually terrific, it's absolutely amazing. The fantasy vision just completely enshrouds you. After that it does suffer a bit from the same problem as its parent: i.e. once they get to the school, you find that without amazing, panoramic things to look at, the story tends to grind on a little (it's a 155 minute movie, after all). However this fault was less bothersome than the first time around, and there is hardly a scene which doesn't contain something unexpectedly delightful (or horrible).
That's one thing that impressed me about Potter II: whereas George Lucas would just fill his second trilogy of Star Wars movies with a plethora of fantastic, whizzing objects, and hope that their cumulative effect would be to daze you into not noticing how boring the film actually is - Columbus deploys all his little cameo monsters, gadgets, objects and scenery with some loving care. The result is that you don't just get gratuitous weird things; you get pleasing weird things which look like they belong where they're filmed, rather than shoved in your face to amaze you.
Though it's quite a while since I saw the original, it seemed to me there was a more adult tone to this film. Certainly there was at least one fairly substantial sequence which was skin-crawling enough to provoke a response in the average adult.
The casting is just superb - again, Columbus employs people who not only can act, but are perfectly suited to their roles, whereas Lucas relegates his few good actors to bit parts and fills his lead roles with people who would barely cut it on 'The Young and the Restless'.
A really impressive film that gets a solid 8.0 from me (the original got 6.0)