By The Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com
The character who was most successful in making the leap to the big screen was Hagrid. They left his personality more or less intact, and Robbie Coltrane was perfect in the part. Coming in a close second is Professor Snape, brought to sneering and campy life by Alan Rickman, who has been spending much of his career preparing for this role. From the outfit to the mannerisms to the permanent sneer of disdain, Rickman really brings it all home, and one can only hope that in future movies he'll get more screen time. However, almost all of the other characters suffered to greater or lesser extent.
Getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop was poor Neville Longbottom, who was clearly relegated by the screenplay to a sub-secondary role, and has been all but kicked right out of the Scooby Gang. Dumbledore had a lot of the quirk sucked right out of him, and has now become a combination of Santa Claus and God the Father. And I never thought I would hear myself saying this about Maggie Smith, but I found her insufficiently severe as Professor McGonigle. Of the kids, Hermione did the best job of projecting a personality, but aside from the bushy hair they saddled her with she was just cute as a little pixie and that somewhat undermined things for me. Ron's backstory about being poor and conflicted about that was drastically shrunk up, and although the kid who plays Draco is excellently smarmy and evil, he didn't get enough screen time.
This is where the dialogue thing comes in. I don't think you can really get enough of a feel for how truly horrible Draco is if you don't see enough of the personal abuse he's so relentless about dealing out to both Ron and Harry. Even the Dursleys were not horrid enough, because although they could do all the Dickensian child-abuse things (cupboard, no meals, CinderHarry cook the breakfast, etc.) they weren't able to fully convey the smallminded self-righteous horror of everything slightly out of the ordinary that makes them such fabulously perfect Muggle specimens. In order to get in all the plot events and the special effects, they essentially summarized the dialogue, taking out anything that didn't advance the story line; so you lost a lot of the character moments. I was especially miffed at the fact that we lost some of the Ron-Hermione stuff, especially the moment when she's worrying about how there's no fire and he yells, "ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?" As for the special effects, I guess I'm just jaded; I expect movies to be able to do just about anything now, and so when I see, say, a baby dragon being born from an egg or people playing rugby/hockey/soccer on brooms, I don't get that excited.
The end of the movie is more successful because the special effects are used to better emotional effect once Harry confronts Quirrell/Voldemort. When You-Know-Who comes to life on the back of Quirrell's head, well, that's mighty freaky. So maybe that's a good sign for the later movies, where that kind of scare becomes more and more important. It'll be interesting to see how the movie deals with the Dementors, for instance.
There were visual elements I really liked--the sorting hat, for instance, although I missed its little song, and the owls at Privet Drive. But overall, I think I better just stop going to movies based on books I like, because it never seems to work. As for the much-discussed John Williams score, I found it inoffensive, but thought there was too much of it--you could hardly help humming the thing as you left the theater, because you'd heard all the themes so goldarned often. In the end, I guess it comes down to this: if you're just there because you want to see what magic a la Rowling looks like, then the movie is good. But I miss the characters as they were in the novels. I'm hoping that the LOTR movies will be more successful, because hey, I don't see how you could possibly do anything but improve on Tolkein's characterization.
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