Magical Movie Misses Magic

Rating: 8/10 (22 November 2001)

Take a incredible book, take away character development,
sections of plot, and much of the humor and what do you get? A
damn fine movie. I can say I enjoyed the movie greatly, but it is
just not the wonderful experience that reading it is. The movie has
limits where imagination does not. In the novel there were so
many little lines that you don't notice when reading through, but
while watching you miss. The little petty interactions that had to be
cut for the movie take away from the character development that
makes the books seem so real. For the most part the casting was
done amazingly well compared to how I saw the characters in my
mind's eye. The three main characters were played exceptionally
well and that was enough to keep the experience alive. Another
problem I saw from how friends of mine who hadn't read the book
reacted to it is that too much was cut out and not accounted for.
Many events just roll into each other and leave the viewer baffled
as to how it got that way. Either way, I'm happy I saw it in the
theater but I won't be tempted to see it again until it comes out on
DVD.