HP1 revisited

Rating: 7/10 (26 November 2010)

Having just watched HP7A aka Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, my mind flies back - almost magically, one might say - to the film which started it all.
My opinion now is not a lot different to what it was then. The book is a delightful experience - it captured my middle-aged imagination on page 1 and never let go for an instance, telling a cracking story well, and having me believe that Harry and his friends were in real jeopardy throughout. The film's main strength is that it captures much of the book very well.
It has two weaknesses, however. The first is that it is, perhaps, a little too respectful towards its source material. This slavish desire to reflect on screen every tiny detail from the novel causes two problems. One, the film becomes somewhat clinically overstuffed with so much tiny detail that it almost suffocates the life out of it and, two, it sets a standard for detail so impossibly high that future films fall short (the portraits and staircases in Hogwarts no longer move, ghosts no longer charge around etc.).
The second weakness is the three principals. I'm sorry, but I find Daniel Radcliffe pretty wooden throughout the series (subject to some comedy bits in a couple of the later films) and, if he was the best casting choice available, the others couldn't have been very good. Rupert Grint is saddled with a Ron Weasley who does him no favours at all. Not until very late in the series is Ron called upon to be anything than a gormless foil for Harry, a task which Grint accomplishes with ease (and I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing). And Emma Watson is just awful. So desperate is she to provide a dynamic performance that her mouth takes on an appallingly hypnotic life of its own. I don't ever recall seeing someone talk with such over-emphatic mouth movements. How curious, then, that future films in the series see Watson develop into being one of the very best things Harry Potter offers the viewer.