Book-Movie Comparison: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first of the movies to make really significants cuts from/changes to the book, even though it doesn’t have the excuse that The Goblet of Fire and on do:  their staggering length.  Rereading this book really reminded me how just how much the movie leaves out, but even though it’s not as faithful as The Sorcerer’s Stone or The Chamber of Secrets, I still maintain that it’s a great movie (spoilers.)

Lots of stuff on the cutting room floor, the hardest of which is the majority of the Marauders stuff.  In this movie, the climactic info-dump gets cut to ribbons, and as a result, we miss out on a lot of interesting backstory on James, Sirius, Lupin, and Pettigrew, backstory that’s been fan-favorite material for years (I believe this is the main reason The Prisoner of Azkaban gets on some fans’ shit lists.)  Additionally, it means the explanations for things like who really betrayed the Potters and why are kind of skimmed over.  I can’t say for sure, since I of course read the book before seeing the movie for the first time, but I feel like this sequence might have been confusing had I not been able to fill in the gaps from the book.

Plenty of other things get taken out, with different levels of importance.  The majority of the Quidditch season is excised, which means Cho and Cedric aren’t introduced in this movie; neither is super crucial at this juncture, but it means they both just pop up in The Goblet of Fire, which does take away just a bit from that film.  Harry gets his Firebolt at the end of the movie instead of the middle, which winds up taking away a big part of the motivation behind Ron and Hermione feuding – because she suspects in the book that the broom came from Sirius Black, the teachers take it away for weeks to check it for jinxes, and Ron is furious that she’d commit such a “crime” against a primo broom.  They’ve only just made up when Scabbers goes missing and sets the whole thing off again.  In the movie, there just isn’t as much brewing.

Some changes are less noticeable, like skipping Harry overhearing Mr. and Mrs. Weasley talking about Sirius Black and just going straight to Mr. Weasley warning Harry.  And there’s always the usual minor character/flavor moments, like Oliver Wood’s desperation to finally win the Quidditch Cup (a casualty of removing most of the Quidditch) or Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil becoming devotees of Professor Trelawney.

A lot of these cuts were made, not so much because they couldn’t fit, but because Alfonso Cuarón wanted to make room for more stylistic sequences and flourishes.  It’s easily the most cinematic film of the franchise; I love the changing-seasons motif with the Whomping Willow, the additions to the single-timeline bent of the Time Turner sequence, and the little moments of casual magic use that make the world feel more well-rounded.

When it comes to casting, David Thewlis and Gary Oldman are, for my money, right on the mark for Lupin and Sirius.  Yes, they’re way too old to be playing their respective characters – domino effects from Alan Rickman’s casting as Snape – but this movie was my introduction to both of them (wow, 2004 was a long time ago,) and they’re both so effective in their roles.  Even though the Shrieking Shack scene is so chopped up, it’s still great due to Thewlis and Oldman’s back-and-forth, with bonus Rickman, and the scene of Sirius asking Harry to come live with him is so lovely.