my favorite of the Potter films

Rating: Null/10 (7 June 2004)

So there Chris Columbus.
I think the Potter films are an entirely different experience for the people who have read the books and those who haven't. I've read them and was somewhat dissappointed by the first two films, and I'll tell you why. I think the movies were great in all the areas where Hollywood is traditionally really good, particularly visually. The movies looked great and it was obvious that a lot of people spent a lot of time creating every little detail that went on film. Where they suffered was the story, in the same way book to film translations always tend to suffer: they try to pack too much story into them... and be "too" faithful. In doing so they lose the "feel" of the original book. The first two Potter films really lacked the (for lack of a better word) magic that the books exuded from every page. Every scene seemed rushed to me because they had to keep the story moving at all times... and I never felt like the movies had a good pace to them, they just sprinted to get all the story across in the two hours they had to tell it.
J.K. Rowling has a writing style that is clever and stylish and fits the world she has created perfectly... and on film that style just doesn't come through at all. To me that writing style is just as important to the story as any of the characters themselves.
So that's why I was expecting more of the same for Potter # 3, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. While I don't think the movie necessarily captures Rowling's style, it at least has it's own style... I got a definite sense of pacing and something else that may sound strange... a sense of geography. By that I mean that I felt like in any given scene I knew where the characters were in relation to previous scenes... like Hogwarts was actually a physical place and not simply a bunch of unrelated sets. ( Can't say the same for # 1 or # 2) They really did a good job of keeping the crux of what I know was a long story (each successive book gets longer) together, and although many of the characters are still relatively one dimensional, for some reason it didn't bother me as much as in the previous films.
I've heard some people say that this was the "darkest" of the Potter movies, but I didn't feel that way at all... I bet if you watched all three back to back they'd be pretty similar. Visually I really think this film is superior to the previous two... from the art direction all the way down to the creature design. There were MANY shots where I really took note of how beautiful a shot they had arranged... and I have to say that John Williams' score complimented it well.
The film didn't strike me as too scary or intense for children, certainly no more or less than the previous films. (I think the next films are going to be very interesting, since the books become more and more adult in nature as they go along... I'm curious to see how they'll handle that.)

Unlike the previous two films where I caught myself checking my watch and massaging my sore butt... I got into this film and found myself laughing a few times at some of the clever gags which, while not absent from the first two films, were simply done better in this film.
So... overall, my longwinded rambling review gives # 3 an 8 out of 10. Kudos to the new Potter director, hopefully you'll keep Columbus strictly as a producer from here on out.