Even worse than I expected

Rating: 2/10 (27 June 2003)

I watched Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone on Sky not expecting too much from it. However, it was far worse than the low expectations I had set out for it. As someone who hasn't read the book(s) I thought I was in a good position to review the film for what it is, a film. However, if you haven't read the book you are unlikely to understand much of what is going on.
Most of the scenes and things that happen do so fairly randomly and for much of the time everything seems pointless. I can't recall the number of times I saw a scene and thought how useless to the 'going-nowhere' plot it was. As well as this, there are scenes included that are obviously relevant to the book but seem to have little relevance to the plot of the film. For example, the ghost like characters were utterly irrelevant and clearly had no purpose in the film whatsoever, adding to the needlessly extensive running time. Then there are the long, drawn out shots of the Hogwarts interiors which are obviously included so the film makers can show off how faithful to the book's descriptions their sets are.
It is these points that mainly annoy me about HPATPS because it is simply a film adaptation of a book that has quite obviously not been adjusted for the screen rendition at all. The pages of the book have been copied over to the script without any logical thought making for a confused mess of a movie.
The film would have been much better being a tighter version of the book, missing out characters and scenes that were of little significance. This is, of course, what has been done in the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy of films with some plot elements being changed entirely to suit the screen and its audience.
Visually, 'The Philosopher's Stone' is inferior to many films I have seen in the past decade and for a film made in 2001, it is very disappointing in this respect. The CG is almost entirely unconvincing with the Quidditch stadium being the most laughable. Perhaps if the rest of the film had been made in a cartoon like style it would have worked but the dark stone interiors and attempts to make the otherworldly creatures look realistic are too much of a contrast to the brightly coloured outdoor arena. This is most hilarious at the end of the quidditch game when Harry is stood on the CG super-flourescent green grass. Then it immediately cuts to a shot outside of Hogwarts where the grass is real, and much darker.
Obviously, readers of the Harry Potter books will get a lot of enjoyment out of a film that lifts the pages of the book and presents you with one person's vision of how it would look in 'reality'. It doesn't allow you to think at all, simply throwing too much Harry Potter detail into your face which, if you're like me, will have its eyes shut and be snoring away by the 'climax'.