Nice Start to a Great Series, but Poor Hagrid.

Rating: 7/10 (2 June 2008)

The movie "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" is a story of one boy who has a terrible childhood. Harry is treated amazingly poorly by his aunt and uncle, who, despite his being an "immense burden", adopted Harry after his mother and father's death. Upon Harry's twelfth birthday his life begins to change; wild unexpected occurrences begin to frazzle Harry's aunt and uncle, but the result of the change is a whole new life of which Harry could not have dreamed.
The movie in my opinion was pretty well done. Visually I think the CGI was great. Some of the action scenes  the ones on broomsticks in particular  were a bit cartoonish, but the overall visual experience was good. I think that the director did a good job of choosing the actors for this film. Dumbledore, the three protagonists, the Weasley twins, etc. were all great. Hagrid's character, on the other hand, was not as great, but I do not think it was the fault of the actor. First, his accent was impeccable. Second, he is visually a true match to Rowling's Hagrid. Where his character fails is in the lines that he was asked to memorize. Simple and repetitive. Rowling gave him many great lines and allowed us to get to know him. Why, script writers, did you not refer to Rowling's book when you asked the question: "What should Hagrid say?" In general I thought the writing for the film was OK, but Hagrid's dialogue was at best mediocre.
The flow of the movie was good  it didn't drag at all. I thought overall the director stayed true to the book's plot with the exception of the beginning and the forest scenes with the centaurs. So as I stated above, the movie was pretty good, a nice start to the movie counterpart of a great book series.