A disappointing translation...

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2002)

Watching this movie was a mixed experience for me. Having read the books, it was interesting to see how the film-makers realized the world of Harry Potter according to their own interpretations, and it was fun comparing these with my own. There were things I liked, and disliked, and I'm just gonna tackle the major ones.
For the most part, the film remains faithful to the book. But I believe that maybe it was too faithful. A lot of the time I felt like I was watching a mish-mash of sequences from the book (in..er...sequence), just acted out. That's perhaps my biggest gripe, that and the story seemed to lack and fluidity or flow. It's like the film-makers said "Hey, everyone who's gonna see this has read the book anyway, who cares about character development or the story? Let's just knock em out with lots of eye-candy".
Granted, I'm willing to wager that a huge majority of the audience has read the books, but I think the film-makers relied on this aspect way too much. Our knowledge of the characters, their relationships and everything else was taken as a given.
My second gripe was with the three main actors. You know, I've never really known what you could define as a 'chemistry' between actors, but I think I do now. The three who played Ron, Harry and Hermione had none. Nada. Zip. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) seemed to lack severely in the enthusiasm department. Where did they find this kid? The other two actors (for Hermione and Ron) weren't nearly as bad, but I just couldn't imagine the three personalities we were presented with on screen, as being friends.

What I liked about the film...? Well the production values were stupidly high, and this is evident in just about every single scene (I'm not complaining!). It's 150 minutes of pure eye-candy. That's probably the only redeeming feature of the film, but we all know that this doth not maketh a good movie. I may sound a little sour about the whole experience (and like one severely disappointed, frothing-at-the-mouth, psychotic Harry Potter fan...seriously, I'm not), but it wasn't completely terrible. Maybe they'll do something about the cut-n-paste recipe for the next film, and the three child actors will mature a little more...and stuff. We'll see!