The Harry Potter films have some problems1, but they came out just at the right time to be a large part of my growing up. I’ve seen them all and, while I think the books are better in a lot of ways, the movies have a lot of charm. Especially the first few.
They’re just done in such a magical way, really capturing the fantastic feel of the world. It makes you wish you could just hop right in and explore the world, Hogwarts castle especially.
And it really was (and remains) fascinating to see the cast grow up through the movies. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like it. They nailed the casting and managed to keep the main trio (and most of the rest of the cast) through 8 films, a decade of filming. That’s just impressive.
New casting for this one, I really do think they did a great job with Kenneth Branagh’s Gilderoy Lockhart. You love to hate him, which is always a role worth pulling off.
On the negative end (in this one in particular), I do not care for how they did Ron dirty. He’s just got the one scared of everything face going through most of the movie.
Overall, I enjoyed it. The first is better–which makes it funnier that I haven’t reviewed it. But I missed (re)watching it with my children, so we’ll just have to start here and catch that some other time.
Onward!
Albus Dumbledore: It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.
As does the author. ↩︎