Spelling tests

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)

&

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Here we go with another double bill.

I have never read any of the Potter books and these are the only two of the adaptations that I have seen so I am not a fan boy. I was too old to be part of the whole “phenomenon” as it unfolded and I would guess that part of the lure for young readers was growing up and going through the school system along with the main characters. With all that being said lets get down to business.

From the first scenes of the first film it is obvious where the series is coming from, you can either call it a successor to a whole tradition of British children's books or a rip off that is just mashing them all together. The story opens with Harry Potter in a Roald Dahl novel, he lives with his aunt, uncle and nephew who hate and mistreat him and from there launches off into Enid Blyton, the odd bit of CS Lewis and a whole bunch of other stuff mashed in. The world of Harry Potter is very much rooted in British nostalgia with it's steam trains and boarding schools of the Victorian, Edwardian and early 20^th century period. Hogwarts, the magic school has all the trappings of an old boarding school with it's houses and strange sports. Having a British cast really helps keep the feel of the world, you could just see someone wanting to stick Tom Hanks in here and a Jodie Foster there.

Both films seem to work off the same formula but unusually Secrets is a vast improvement on Stone. The first film does not appear to have much to it really, Harry wishes he had a normal family and the basic plot is stopping the bad guy getting the Stone. When we get to the second film, while it basically follows the same route as the first the plot has much more meat on it's bones and we start to find out more about the characters themselves. You could say that the Potter world is something of a middle class aspiration fantasy world and the second film certainly gets into these class issues with the elitism of the pure blood magic users.

After watching the first two films in the series I am not really in a rush to go out and read the rest of the books or watch the rest of the films but they are not that bad when watched as an alleged adult either, even if it is a bit of a case of trying to see what parts of your childhood got pinched to make up which part of the Potter world. The fact that the first two films stuck pretty closely to the same formula would also discourage me slightly from seeking out further books/films. I would give the first film 3/5 but the second film a much improved 4/5.