The Boy Who Lived has cast his spell on the box office since “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first film in Warner Bros.’ blockbuster franchise, hit theaters in 2001.
The bestselling, seven-book series was adapted into eight record-breaking films — and a two-part play — as the boy wizard ventured through Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the wizarding world with his pals Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, taking on the enigmatic Lord Voldemort and his magical henchmen each school year.
As J.K. Rowling’s debut novel “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” — the first of the books from which the decade-spanning films were adapted — marks its 20th anniversary, here’s a reminder of how Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan reviewed the “Harry Potter” films. (Spoiler alert: He didn’t always like them.)
As his 11th birthday approaches, orphan Harry Potter learns that he’s a wizard and enrolls at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where his reputation as the Boy Who Lived precedes him during his magical training.
“The result is a remarkably faithful copy of the book that treats the text like holy writ (hence its 2-hour-and-33-minute length),” wrote The Times’ film critic Kenneth Turan. “From the gold in Gringotts, the safe-as-houses goblin-run bank, to the centaur lurking in the forbidden forest that adjoins Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, so much is presented just as written that ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ starts to resemble one of those fiendishly exact replicas of great works of art that Sunday painters can be seen working on in galleries of museums.”
In their second year at Hogwarts, Harry and his pals Ron and Hermione contend with a celebrity author professor and a well-meaning house elf named Dobby who thwart the trio in unexpected ways.
“The darkness that invades ‘Chamber of Secrets’ underlines how well the books managed to exactly balance good and evil, dark and light, so that within their pages you seemed to be experiencing both at the same time. Not so here,” Turan wrote. “Because ‘Chamber of Secrets’ can’t seem to get the balance right, it ends up broadly overdoing things on both ends of the spectrum. The film’s scary moments are too monstrous and its happy times have too much idiotic beaming, making the film feel like the illegitimate offspring of ‘Alien’ and ‘The Absent-Minded Professor.'”
3. ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ film comes close to capturing the essence of the books (2004)
The wizarding world gets markedly darker as convicted murderer Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), who is believed to have killed Harry’s parents, escapes from the Azkaban prison and the soul-sucking Dementors are loosed to chase him down. Director Alfonso Cuarón takes the helm from Chris Columbus, who directed the two previous films.
“[T]he final hour of the two-hour-and-21-minute ‘Azkaban’ is the closest any of the films has gotten to capturing the enormously pleasing essence of the Potter books,” wrote Turan, adding, “Those three leads (Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, Emma Watson as Hermione, Rupert Grint as Ron) play characters who are now 13, an age when anger and frustration are more publicly expressed. One of the benefits of Cuarón’s direction, his expertise with younger actors, means that…
The post Celebrating #HarryPotter20: How Harry Potter and his blockbuster films came of age on screen appeared first on FeedBox.