So much better than Columbus

Rating: 7/10 (1 June 2004)

*Some (very limited) spoilers*
I would seriously question the aesthetic judgment of anyone who didn't immediately see that Cuaron's Harry Potter 3 is in a different league altogether from Columbus's weak and humorless efforts to realize books one and two. It's not just that the overall look and feel of film three is so much more convincing; even in the small details, the superiority of Cuaron as a director is obvious. For example, where Columbus tries to gain a sense of the end of term at Hogwarts by inserting some ploddingly conventional "Christmassy scenes" (accompanied by some sickeningly jingly music from John Williams), Cuaron treats us to a much more subtle shot - Harry's snowy owl, Hedwig, flies across a beautifully composed wide-angle shot, and as the camera follows her, the landscape behind her gradually passes from gloomy late autumnal green/grey mountains to wintry snow. The effect is altogether more mysterious.
Furthermore, Cuaron's grasp of cinematic language is so much more complex and assured than the rather basic vision of Columbus. From the very beginning of the film, we have references to the passage of time, a crucial theme of book 3: the large pendulum of an enormous clock swings menacingly in a school corridor, we see Harry's face through the face of a clock way before the final time-turning episode, while models of planetary movements set the action in a more cosmic frame. Equally, the issue of identity so central to the plot of Azkaban, is foregrounded by Cuaron's use of reflection - what better way to signal the fact that Harry is beginning to grapple with the mystery of his past and the absence of his parents? Thus, the doublings of the final sequence, where Harry has to avoid his other self while he rescues his godfather, are foreshadowed by shots of Harry's face reflected in the darkened window of a train and in the rippling water of the lake.
Cuaron also brings a much more vivid sense of humour to these movies than Columbus. The jokes in the first movies are often painfully laboured - one can't help feeling that Steve Kloves continues to miss the distinctive and colourful humour of Rowling's prose, in particularly her wonderful delineation of character. Cuaron is able to relieve this by inserting some visual humour - when Hagrid produces the hyppogriff, Harry finds himself "volunteering" only because the rest of the class have backed off in horror!
That's not to say that the movie is perfect. Some of the CGI shots are wonderful (the hyppogriff looks amazing), but the werewolf is distinctly dodgy, and there aren't enough scary shots of the Dementors. I can't help feeling that Cuaron was hampered here by the need to get a PG certificate for a film which would perhaps ideally have been a 12A. Also, the script misses out incredibly important material - such as the connection between Harry's father and the marauder's map. This will only make the near-impossible task which faces Mike Newell more difficult - reducing book 4 to a two and a half hour movie is a gargantuan task in itself, without having to fill in gaps which book 3 should have covered!
There are some tantalising clues here to the (yet unwritten) final books. A speech by Lupin on a bridge stresses the kindness of Harry's mother in precedence to the rule-breaking of his father. Will Harry's obsession with his Dad in the earlier books yield to a better understanding of his mother's history and sacrifice in the later novels? Such a twist would surely appeal to an author who began to write as a struggling single mother...