As
someone who’s seen all the Harry Potter
movies multiple times but has lately started revisiting the books for the first
time in years, it’s time to look at the films again specifically from an
adaptation standpoint. The Sorcerer’s Stone – like, I’m
assuming, The Chamber of Secrets to
follow – is pretty faithful to the book, but there are still changes made here
(spoilers.)
Many of
the characters are rendered quite faithfully.
McGonagall, Hagrid, and Snape are perfect (even if Alan Rickman was way
too old to have been a contemporary of Harry’s parents, thus throwing off the
ages for all the actors in that generation,) as are Hermione, Draco, and
Neville. Ron is pretty close, although
I’d have liked to see a little more of his fears about not being able to
measure up compared to his brothers. I
also feel Dumbledore is just slightly
off the mark – the enigmatic stuff is there, along with the
cool-head-in-a-crisis thing, but I’d forgotten quite how quirky he is in the
books, and that only comes across a little.
And actually, Harry loses a bit of something as well. He’s recognizably Harry, but at this point,
the character doesn’t really have Harry’s sarcastic edge; especially at the
beginning when he’s with the Dursleys, he copes with his deplorable
circumstances with a lot of biting remarks under his breath (followed by swift
ducks to avoid getting slapped or hit – charming folks, his Muggle relations.)
Just
about as much of the plot as will fit is present here. A few things are moved around, some things
happen slightly differently, and Neville doesn’t feature in the movie quite as
much as he does in the book (he’s along for the first encounter with Fluffy and he gets tangled up in the dragon
business, which lands him in detention in the Forbidden Forest with the
others,) but the film hits all the major beats and then some. One of the bigger changes occurs when the
trio works their way through the enchantments protecting the Stone. I understand the desire to cut out one of the
challenges, and Snape’s makes the most sense to drop – there’s less action, it
doesn’t actually have much to do with magic, and really, why would you create a
barrier to the Sorcerer’s Stone and then include a logic puzzle to get past it? But having done that, it means Hermione gets
a solid win with the Devil’s Snare instead of solving the puzzle, and so we
lose the great bit of her panicking that there’s no wood to light a fire and
Harry shouting, “ARE YOU A WITCH OR AREN’T YOU?” Love that.
The film
also starts the time-honored tradition of shortening the Big Villain Monologue,
very understandably so. Even though
villain monologue in every medium, they only do it for pages in books, and that
level of expository dialogue couldn’t be sustained onscreen, especially at the
climax. I’d say it strikes a pretty good
balance here, including all the important information without dragging it out
too long.
The most
significant changes, for me, are with some of the more minor characters. In particular, Lee Jordan’s commentary during
the Quidditch match is too factual and not nearly as funny, and it’s clear that
Dean Thomas is little more than an extra – I miss his and Ron’s back-and-forth
about soccer and Quidditch, and as someone who grew up in the Muggle world, it’s
illogical to have him be the one to identify Neville’s Remembrall.
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