When the lights went down at the premiere of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the large audience, many of them youngsters, cheered.
Ah, I thought, this is going to be an audience-participation movie.
Which wouldn’t have been surprising, given the fanatical following JK Rowling’s teen wizard character has developed around the world. I expected the audience at the premiere to cheer Harry Potter’s victories and boo his foes, to gasp when he got into danger, to weep with joy when he escaped.
But, except for a few exclamations of disgust at some snot-related moments, the audience was silent. Either they were a very well-behaved lot, or the movie was less exciting than it could have been. It certainly left me disappointed. Despite the impressive visuals and some nice work from the likes of Richard Harris, Maggie Smith and Robbie Coltrane, it felt rather flat.
In case you are not one of the millions who have read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (it becomes the Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States, where they presumably have not heard of philosophers), it goes like this. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is an 11-year-old orphan living with his aunt, uncle and cousin. They do not treat him very well; his room is the cupboard under the stairs. But there is something special about Harry, which we know sooner in the movie than in the book, because right at the start we see a couple of wizards dropping the little foundling off on his relatives’ doorstep.
Later on, he will begin to get letters dropped off by owls, letters that inform him he is a wizard-to-be and has been enrolled at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Despite the resistance of his foster family, he gets to Hogwarts, and there his adventures really begin. Apart from coming to terms with this bizarre and wondrous new environment, he and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) have to save Hogwarts — which is to say, the world — from the menace of the evil wizard Voldemort.
The movie transposes the book’s narrative with dutiful fidelity, which contributes to its running-time of two and a half hours. This seems odd, in that it’s not as though the book ceases to exist once the movie has been made, and we want the kids to keep reading, don’t we? The film has less of the book’s jolly-hockey-sticks tone, but also fewer laughs. It flows along smoothly, from one episode to the next, without much rhythm, and some of the more hair-raising sequences seem curiously underplayed.
Harris and Smith do well as wizard professors Dumbledore and McGonagall respectively, and Coltrane is effective as the giant Hagrid. The child leads, however, lack something: several times I felt as though I wanted to tell them to try harder, do another take, once more with feeling.
Oh, and despite the up-to-the-minute technological modernity of the huge Montecasino cinema, the movie was out of focus.