Awful, to say the least.

Rating: 1/10 (12 July 2003)

I've read the book only to see what all the hype's about. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. It was a very easy book to follow and dares to be nothing more than it actually is - a plain old nothing-new-under-the-sun children's book. In that, Rowling did a fine job. Snippets from Lord of the Rings, Dracula, Ender's Game, to name a few, were bluntly used throughout the book and meshed together to form this trashy, 2 cents of a fantasy story. Oh well, as long as it keeps my children reading.
But the movie... oh, well, now that's plain sad. I don't recall ever seeing such forced adaptation of a book to a movie. Everything about this movie is wrong. The younger actors act so bad they seem to take part of some sorry school play, the CG effects are ridiculously unrealistic, the script is just a scribble of the original book's text rather than telling an actual story. And the list goes on.
The fact that Rowling insisted on having only British actors seem to have been the first mine laid on a shaggy path to a bearable movie. Steven Spielberg (who was offered the job) could have done a much better job in directing just as much as Haley Joel Osment (6th Sense, who was suggested by Spielberg for the part) could have been a MUCH more convincing Harry Potter. A whole lot of the experience was missed, as the rest was brutally murdered by idiotic idealism by the author. Plain sad.
The worst part is that such a horror of a movie had earned so much money to its makers. Kinda blows away all wishes of becoming a good, hard-working director... it seems that skill has nothing to do with success. :)
It deserves nothing more than 1/10.