An inspired compromise!

Rating: Null/10 (26 November 2001)

I have read some 200 of the reviews, and apart from the religious nutter who thinks that JK Rowling is a supporter of the Beelzebub-Moloch fan club (I sincerely hope that Ms Rowling puts a few barbs into her later books about this sort of character, perhaps a Professor Waco, visiting expert in Defence against Nonexistent Things in volume 6 would be appropriate), it seems to me that this movie has managed to achieve a remarkable compromise.
Leaving aside the slightly uneven quality of the CGI (and the centaur in particular), relevant criticism seems rare (Harry isn't Indiana Jones, he's something of an Everyman who has wound up somewhere where there are many wonderful things, and he's the only one who doesn't understand them; but then 11 year olds aren't like that are they?). There seems to be almost no criticism of the cast - in my opinion this is probably the best cast film I have seen since Casablanca (and I thought Paul Henreid/Victor Laszlo was pretty doubtful - who would get killed for a wimp like him?). Similarly, there has been, as far as I can see, none at all of the visualization of the train, Hogwart's school, Hagrid's hut or any of the other locations. In fact, King's Cross station platforms 9 and 10 are much less interesting than the film version. OK Harry's cubby-hole was less grim than I had imagined, and the Dursleys less wicked and malevolent, but I suspect more literal visual versions of the book would begin to raise questions about why Harry hadn't been carted off by social workers.
The filmmakers have managed to:
1) Satisfy the primary target audience of the books, viz. children from 8 to 14
2) Satisfy the adult readers of the series who find the books a witty and compelling read
3) Satisfy some of the adult non-readers, and after all, if you haven't been persuaded to read Harry Potter by the sheer magnitude of the interest, then you probably aren't very susceptible to this kind of thing
4) Capture enough of the essence of a fairly anarchic English boarding school to make it into a place which is in fact dominated by a society of children, even if the adults are nominally in charge.
The film had to be a massive compromise; it could not contain every detail. I should have liked more Snape, more Scabbers and more Hermione being clever, and being lonely, more Weasleys Â… but then I usually manage to sit through Seven Samurai in one go, few 8 years olds have the bladder capacity to manage that.
JK Rowling's style is, in many ways, very 'flat'; she tells you just what you need to know- though you don't always realize it- with sharp wit, so there was only a very limited scope for interpreting the story without distorting it. This is, perhaps, the exact opposite of Shakespeare where the richness of the language allows all kinds of distortion of the presentation without any harm at all being done to the play, indeed the most basic production can sometime bring out the genius of the language better than large amounts of 'reality' can.
Chris Columbus was on a hiding to nothing. A darker film would have had parents complaining that their 8 year old needed therapy after seeing Voldemort, a more slapstick film would have infuriated the adult readers, a more 'adult' version would have debased the underlying insecurity and humanity of Harry, and a Hollywood brat version would have had UK audiences setting fire to the cinema.
I both enjoyed the film enormously, and on reflection consider that, although it was a very easy box office success, it was actually, I suspect, a very difficult project.