The final Harry Potter closed a decade of hits—and of failed attempts at the next Harry Potter
Image: Graphic: Rebecca Fassola Film Features Harry Potter
The Harry Potter series was too big to fail, and yet it could’ve failed so easily, again and again. In Harry Potter, Warner Bros. had a diamond mine: a series of books that had become a massively lucrative global phenomenon, with a built-in and devoted young audience, plus some blockbuster-ready good-and-evil spectacle. It also had a cast full of children, a gigantic budget, a very active author with veto power, and a fanbase that would’ve been happy to riot at all but the most minute changes. The series lasted a decade. Its trio of young stars stayed with the franchise the whole time, handled the brain-crushing media attention with grace, and managed not to become cautionary tales. None of this was inevitable.
The Harry Potter movies are no masterpieces, but it’s a small miracle that the series managed to get through all eight of its installments without ever veering off the tracks. With most of the copycat franchises, things turned out differently. When Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone became the biggest box-office earner of 2001, Hollywood’s studios raced to catch up, adapting virtually every halfway popular series of young-adult fantasy novels. By the time the Harry Potter films reached their climactic 2011 ending, those other attempts had crashed and burned spectacularly.
All through the ’00s, the Harry Potter imitators were legion. If you had a book series about a special kid with secret powers entering into a magical new world, your book series was about to become at least one movie. Most of those films failed wildly, and their titles now exist only as strange and mysterious curiosities left over from a forgotten time: Eragon, Seventh Son, Alex Rider: Stormbreaker, The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. You’re not having a stroke! These movies exist!
In those misbegotten years, the studios tossed up brick after brick, attempting to hit that elusive Potter-level half-court shot. Disney tried to turn its old Fantasia short The Sorcerer’s Apprentice into a Jerry Bruckheimer fantasy, with Nicolas Cage as a Dumbledore type and Jay Baruchel as a Potter type. Fox got the rights for Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, probably the best and most popular books of the post-Potter zeitgeist, and the studio brought in Chris Columbus, director of the first two Potter films, to kick off the saga. But they cast a group of deeply bland and uninteresting kids, and the movies hit like a wet fart. The first Percy Jackson got one lower-budgeted sequel, and that was it for the series. New Line took a run at Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, but the 2007 adaptation The Golden Compass was a boring, confusing mess. The film attempted to omit just about all the anti-religious messaging of the book, but religious organizations freaked out anyway, and the planned film series immediately died. His Dark Materials seems to be faring much better as an HBO show.
Even Narnia clanged off the back of the rim. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe was a smash, one of the biggest hits of 2005. But the public met its two sequels with a collective shrug. Somewhere, someone was probably planning a whole C.S. Lewis theme park that will never come into being. Supposedly, another two Narnia movies will eventually come out as direct-to-Netflix releases, but nobody seems too worried about if and when that will actually happen. Somehow, the Potter imitations are still coming out and still flailing; witness the 2020 Disney+ release of Artemis Fowl, the widely reviled kid-lit adaptation from former Potter cast member Kenneth Branagh.
The one attempt at Potter-level mania that actually worked was Twilight, which had its own literary-phenomenon headwinds and also had Potter-alum heartthrob Robert Pattinson at its center. The absolutely bonkers Twilight films had a whole cosmology of their own, which really had nothing to do with the extended Potter universe. Instead, the Twilight movies seemed aimed at the older sisters of the Potter fans—or maybe at the Potter fans who weren’t kids anymore. In 2011, when the Potter series wrapped up, Twilight was getting close to the finish line as well. The No. 3 hit of that year was the penultimate entry The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1. The success of Twilight would lead to its own young-adult mini-boom.
Really, though, Harry Potter was peerless. In retrospect, the series’ whole 10-year project serves as a model for long-term blockbuster world-building. Marvel certainly followed its lead—introducing screen adaptations of beloved print characters, building them slowly over multiple movies, bringing everything to the big climax that dominates all its theatrical rivals. (Marvel also borrowed the effect where the big-bad villain dissolves into dust at the end.) The Potter movies had started out wooden and pedestrian, but they’d grown with their stars, finding new emotional notes and big, imaginatively staged moments. By the time they finished up in 2011, the movies were pretty good.
A lot of that has to do with the directors. After those underwhelming first two Chris Columbus movies, Potter producer David Heyman brought in ringers Alfonso Cuarón and Mike Newell for one film apiece. But for the last four Potter entries, the film found its steward: David Yates, a veteran of British TV, who oversaw things as the series entered its darker, more grown-up second half. It made sense, really. When you were coming out with another movie almost every year, the movies themselves practically became TV, so a TV guy might’ve been best-qualified to keep the gears turning. Marvel probably learned something from that, too. For its Avengers franchise, Marvel started out with Joss Whedon and then moved onto the Russo Brothers. TV guys all.
J.K. Rowling was still writing the Potter books as the movies came out, and the books got longer and longer. By the end, they physically looked and felt like cinderblocks, so the producers made the entirely sane decision to cut the final book into two films. (Virtually every successful fantasy series would follow that model, including Avengers.) As a result, 2010’s Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a bit of a grim slog, full of endless scenes of the movie’s kids teleporting to different picturesque bits of remote British landscape and sweatily arguing with each other. But Part 2, by far the highest-grossing film of 2011, is practically all climax. It’s two straight hours at the fireworks factory, and it’s a lot of fun.
Deathly Hallows: Part 2 uses apocalypse as its starting point. The non-evil side of the wizarding world has fallen. The Minister Of Magic is dead, with a fascist puppet in his place. Lord Voldemort’s fanatical minions have taken power, and they kill at will. Several beloved characters are already dead, and more will die. Our heroes are on the run, in a mad Hail Mary scramble. They have to make their move or all is lost. If you’d been following along with all the Potter films leading up to this, that’s a pretty thrilling place to be. And given that all seven of the previous movies had been hits, the Potter producers could be fairly confident that you had been following along.
Yates and his actors filmed Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2 back-to-back, and the two movies opened just eight months apart. Part 2 has a bit of throat-clearing, including an action set piece that seems clearly designed to be remade as a roller coaster. But the early scenes don’t take too long, and they do a nice job selling the stakes of what’s to come. A lot of that has to do with the casting. Early on, the producers made the smart decision to surround their young cast members with grand and imperious British Shakespearean stage actors. But the time the films wrapped up, practically the entire U.K. theatrical ecosystem was involved. On days when the Battle Of Hogwarts was filming, there must’ve been tumbleweeds blowing through the West End.
J.K. Rowling’s books are practically plot machines, and Deathly Hallows: Part 2 handles all the frantic story twists of the book with relative aplomb, never getting too deep into the woods about what, exactly, a horcrux is. Part 2 is only a little over two hours, and it seems to rocket by. The movie barely slows down to breathe for some of the story’s big emotional beats, but considering that it covers a time when the characters couldn’t exactly process those events either, the speed works.
The final battle itself has an appropriately grand scale, and it’s wild how much better the effects became over 10 years of Potter movies. There are cool sights aplenty in Part 2, from Dementors eerily hovering in the mist to a giant sweeping a battleaxe back and forth like a hockey stick to a werewolf gloating over a kid’s bloody corpse. (I bet this movie fucked some kids up.) Eduardo Serra’s cinematography is dark, and it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s going on, but the sense of all-enveloping chaos is still effective. A few images linger: The Malfoy family fleeing Hogwarts in rictus silent-film panic; the sympathetic ghosts of dead protectors hovering around Harry; the searing brightness of Harry’s afterlife vision. For a blockbuster that has to follow a rigid storyline and fulfill its corporate obligations, little moments like those are sometimes enough.
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 couldn’t ever be a truly moving cinematic vision. It had to follow a severely restrictive and intricately laid out story, it had to appeal to the widest possible global audience, and it had to avoid pissing off any of the people who’d constructed identities around loving Harry Potter. In a way, maybe it’s better to judge a film like Deathly Hallows: Part 2 as if it’s a season finale of a massive-budget TV series. In season finale terms, though, Deathly Hallows delivers. It even gives its characters a nice little grace note, flashing forward a couple of decades to when the characters, in convincing middle-aged makeup, are parents themselves. For a coming-of-age story, that epilogue works as one final rite of passage.
Of course, the end wasn’t the end. The Potter kids all went on to varyingly successful post-Potter careers, and the beloved adult character actors went back to being beloved adult character actors onstage and in films with relatively few CGI effects. But David Yates followed Deathly Hallows: Part 2 with the disastrous 2016 flop The Legend Of Tarzan, and then he went right back to the wizard stuff. Yates has already directed the first two of Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them spin-offs. Those movies got everything wrong that the original Potter series got right. They’re narratively incoherent, irritatingly antic, and catastrophically badly cast, with Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne gracelessly mugging and Johnny Depp radiating creep-vibes in all directions. That series, like so many of the Potter pretenders of years past, should feel free to hurl itself into the nearest dumpster.
J.K. Rowling, meanwhile, has taken apparent delight in revealing herself to be a shithead. In the years after the Potter films ended, she’s made occasional baffling pronouncements about her characters, proclaiming traits that simply don’t exist in the books and providing the material for some of the best pieces in Clickhole history. Then Rowling decided to make a whole holy-war campaign out of denying that trans women are women, doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on her rancidly shitty take. In the process, she’s risked losing the affection of entire generations who came up on her books. The Harry Potter movies stuck the landing. J.K. Rowling did not.
The runner-up: Two of 2011’s biggest hits were entries in long-running action-movie franchises, and both of them were wild stunt spectaculars. I love them both, and it’s hard to pick a favorite. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the year’s No. 7 earner, had Tom Cruise climbing the side of the Burj Khalifa and then running down the wall, in real life. I watched that sequence on an IMAX screen while extremely high, and I practically chewed the knuckles off of my hand. But I’ve got to give the slight edge to Fast Five, No. 6 for the year, which brought back a cast full of crowd favorites, booked Vin Diesel to beat the Rock in a hand-to-hand fight, and then ended everything with the glorious bedlam of the bank vault being dragged through the streets of Rio—a beautiful achievement in the field of sheer delirious spectacle.
Next time: Marvel reaches the first of its intricately plotted-out climactic moments, uniting its carefully compiled cast of characters in The Avengers.
432 Comments
The
final Harry Potter film is wickedly entertaining, though I felt the creators
misunderstood or glossed over the story’s deeper themes; it’s always annoyed me
that Harry dueled Voldemort alone in the courtyard rather than being surrounded
by his community of loved ones. Then again, I’ve always felt the final book was
the weakest in the series because Rowling is at her best when writing
whodunits; the first six books are mysteries disguised as fantasies, and the
transition to a war / quest novel didn’t exactly play to her strengths. Yates is
fine but I’d love to have seen Cuaron come back for the finale.I was
having an argument with some friends the other day about how I feel the first
Deathly Hallows film, the one with the camping trip, was a missed opportunity.
It almost felt like they were trying to sneak an art-house film into the Harry
Potter franchise, so why not go all the way with it? Have the movie directed by
Terrence Malick or Jim Jarmusch in full Paterson mode. I’d love to see a film
where Harry emotionally prepares for the final battle by moodily wandering
through snowy streets and deserted strip malls, pondering the choices that led
him to this place. Gorgeously cinematic shots of bleak winter sunlight falling
over him as he stalks through a rundown slum or an abandoned housing
development. The movie was going to make a billion dollars anyway so the
creators really had nothing to lose. They’d have been heroes.
Would you have given the first one to Terry Gilliam, like Rowling wanted?
That would have been interesting, but you wonder if his version would have been safe enough for Warner Bros execs to guarantee a full on franchise.
A Gilliam adaptation of the first book would probably have been more creatively interesting, but would the box office match Columbus’s?
He’d probably still be in editing.
As long as he’s not cutting Rik Mayall from the final version, then I’ll let him off.
Glad I’m not the only one nursing that particular sore spot.
Doubly annoying was the later Potter books reflecting what we were given on screen, meaning Peeves just disappears as a character. All because Columbus cut out Rik’s scenes from the first film.Also who doesn’t want Rik Mayall in their film?
An idiot, that’s who.
I was especially excited because he was my fantasy casting. As I read I thought he’d be a perfect Peeves. The only other one I got right was Timothy Spall for Wormtail, and then they cut Peeves.
I think anyone who loved British comedy and read those books before the films came out had some very specific casting choices in mind while reading.
(For me it was Jennifer Saunders as Rita Skeeter, and initially Rowan Atkinson in full Blackadder mode as Snape)
I saw the first one before I read them, so only fantasy cast roles that didn’t appear in the first film.
If Gilliam did it, some awful thing would happen during the filming of it and the studio would demand he cut half of it out
“you wonder if his version would have been safe enough for Warner Bros execs to guarantee a full on franchise”The way child actors age so quickly, there was no way they would risk the franchise to someone they worried would fall behind schedule.
If I remember correctly, though Gilliam has had multiple stories about this over the years, the main objection for doing the movie was that the studio wanted to make the first two films back to back, and Gilliam wanted to have the time for post production to make the first one. He didn’t want to be essentially a cog in an assembly line.
I do think though that he probably would have had a very different career if he had taken the job, tried to do the best he could do within the system, because it would have been a surefire hit anyway.
It would have set a very different template for the movies for sure, and I think his casting choices would have been a little less Masterpiece theater.
I wonder if he would have cast John Neville as Dumbledore.
I am so sick of hearing Gilliam’s whining about the film. He hasn’t made a good film for decades and his version would have been obnoxious.
Of all the directors who met with WB, the one who would have made both a commercially responsible and artistically adventurous children’s film would have been Peter Weir.Now Weir is a great director.
I love Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World. I was a little disappointed that it was overshadowed by LOTR, the cinematography, acting and score were excellent.
Terry “I Did Monty Python and Brazil and I Am Milking That Lifetime Pass” Gilliam. I’m being unfair – he also made 12 Monkeys, which is a stone classic. And he made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is an electric piece of cinema that got teenagers in the 90s fixated on Johnny Depp and Hunter S Thompson and should be treated as a fucking war crime for that reason.
Let’s throw Time Bandits in there, and Munchausen. I do enjoy those movies.
Worse yet it got Johnny Depp fixated on HST and in fact hanging out with HST regularly, which I blame (fairly or otherwise) on Depp’s late-career collapse into alcoholic creepiness. Remember when Depp’s name on a project sparked interest rather than revulsion?And yeah: if you’re gonna coast on a trifecta of movies, you could do a lot worse than Time Bandits, Brazil and 12 Monkeys. In fact it’s hard to imagine doing better. But man, the later half of Gilliam’s career has not been pretty.
I’ll defend Tideland, but I haven’t even seen any of his stuff since Parnassus. And I used to love Gilliam, I spent months looking forward to Brothers Grimm. lol
Tideland was for sure Gilliam’s last “good” movie.
“And he made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is an electric piece of cinema that got teenagers in the 90s fixated on Johnny Depp and Hunter S Thompson and should be treated as a fucking war crime for that reason.”Hey now, I already loved Gilliam, Depp, and Thompson BEFORE the movie! Of course, I didn’t know many other 13 year olds who loved 12 Monkeys, Ed Wood, and the book of Fear and Loathing (which my mom gave to me in like 6th grade), so maybe you are on to something.
Whoa, I had no idea Weir could’ve been involved with Harry Potter! He absolutely is a great director but I’m not sure he would’ve fit here. I like the books but they divorce magic from the real world, it’s just something in the air people use, and Weir strikes me as a person very interested in the natural world, man and environment reacting to each other. Maybe this could’ve been reflected in the kids and their relationship to their school but I think Weir would fit much better in an actual adaptation of one of the flops Tom mentions above: The Dark Is Rising.
I hear what you are saying and the wonder and horror of the natural world certainly is a key concern across his career.As you alluded to, a key theme that runs across his work is the collision between the individual and a system of values: these divides can be tied into issues of class (“The Plumber”), nationality (“Gallipoli” and “Green Card”), culture (“Witness”), age (“Dead Poet’s Society”), experience (“Fearless”) and even celebrity (“The Truman Show”). His films are about the barriers that separate people and the emotional experiences that connect them. His consistent celebration of individual resilience would have made for a good thematic fit for the central trio while his technical command of cinematic grammar would have given us a more exciting and original introduction into the cinematic world of “Harry Potter”.
“Oh captain, my captain -”“GET DOWN OFF THAT DESK POTTER”No, I really like this argument you’re making here. I wonder how that technical command would work in a movie so reliant on special effects — his big forays into this kind of spectacle, The Truman Show and Master & Commander, were largely practical, right? Or based in the practicality of the effect. I can picture him doing great with Quidditch/flying sequences, it’s the stuff like trolls and magic spells zapping around I’m more skeptical but curious about.
I think it was simply because the studio’s thinking was ‘who has directed a movie set at a boarding school? Get me the guy who did Dead Poets Society!’
It was that imaginative thinking that lead Columbus to hire that movie’s director of photography.
Peter Weir has a really interesting filmography. There are instant classics like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, and Master and Commander. But there’s also some cracking good thrillers like Witness and The Year of Living Dangerously, he’s had a couple not so great movies, but he’s never less than fascinating. I like Fearless probably more than most people as well.
He is in his 80s. You need not listen to old men yelling at clouds if you don’t want to.
Wow, that’s such a good idea I’m ashamed I never thought of it. Weir got an great performance out of a Harry Potter-aged Max Pirkis in Master & Commander…
Yeah, the saddest part is that the final confrontation takes place in the courtyard so that the movie can draw it out with a lot of visual “style” that gussies things up a little but actually doesn’t accomplish much. It’s like the studio sent a note “Ending not epic enough—couldn’t Harry and V. wrestle a bit, first?”
And they glossed over Fred’s death (and Percy’s reunion) to do it!Unforgivable, haha.
That’s actually one thing I preferred. I didn’t like in the book how it was pages and pages and *pages* of Voldemort monologuing, followed by an avada kadavera, a counter, and he’s dead. I was like “jesus that was anticlimactic.”
I didn’t like in the book how it was pages and pages and *pages* of Voldemort monologuing, followed by an avada kadavera, a counter, and he’s dead. I was like “jesus that was anticlimactic.”I pretty much agree with you, although, given what Rowling wanted to say in that book, Voldemort’s end being an anticlimax was somewhat inevitable. One point of the last two books is that Harry’s final confrontation isn’t going to outdo Dumbledore vs. Voldemort in terms of magic. Harry wasn’t going to become a more skilled wizard than Dumbledore in two years. It was always going to be about his sacrifice and the power of love. Sure, it was a pain that Rowling thought that giving us not just pages of monologue but pages of exposition at the climax was a good idea, but the movie was never going to fall into that because they couldn’t.It’s mainly the execution that sucked. For example, I rather liked the extended fight scene to kill Nagini in the movie, although the book’s version (where Neville pulls the sword out of the Sorting Hat and beheads Nagini before anyone really knows what’s going on) is one of the most nakedly cinematic moments in the series. The extended fight was well-staged, and it gave Ron and Hermione something to do. On the other hand, having Harry and Voldy wrestle and disapparate and their faces are becoming one was probably something that looked like a great idea in storyboards but was underwhelming on screen. It would’ve been better to have Voldemort in the Great Hall pulling out all the FX stops to fulfill his promise to murder everyone Harry loves, and for Harry to then have the Neo-in-The-Matrix realization that his sacrifice broke Voldemort’s power (which is something that we’re only told, but not actually shown, in the book). Maybe that’d leave the final duel as a bit of a quick-draw disappointment, but it would at least be well earned.
I thought the last two movies were fine enough and worked well as a two-parter because of the clear difference in tones between the two, but yeah, I think any issues I have with it are from finding the writing in that book to be the weakest. (Or it’s maybe just the one where I have a couple specific examples of weak writing that jumped out at me because I was in high school and had to write about it for a class) Besides the epilogue, there are two things that bug me: toward the beginning, I believe when Harry and the Order of the Phoenix are planning an escape, he says something to the effect of them not being like the Death Eaters because they won’t just blast anyone in their way, but then he’s even using some of the unforgivable curses, which I was fine with in theory when it seemed like this was something he’d answer for later, but it just never comes up again; and McGonagall’s throwing all the Slytherins in the dungeon being treated as this great applause worthy move, tossing out any nuance we were supposed to see around them.
Along those lines, it bothered me that every single Slytherin chose to leave before the last battle. Not one of those students, even the younger classes, had a shred of conscience? Meh
Christ, even the likes of Liz Cheney and Joe Walsh have stood up against Trumpism, you think a few Slytherins would have been like “You know what? Fuck this fascist, racist asshat.”OTOH, didn’t Slugworth participate in the Battle of Hogwarts in the book? Or did he just usher the Slytherin twerps out?
He did, but remember: Slugworth was presented as basically “the one good Slytherin” from the second of his introduction in HBP. Is he vain and pompous? Did he tell Tom Riddle terrible secrets cos he had his ego-stroked? Sure. But he was also genuinely jolly, liked his students. He played favorites and was a schmoozer. It bothers me that EVERY Slytherin took off. It’s fair to interpret that, sure. Slytherins are more prone to look out for themselves, and nope out of a battle they may very well die in. AS UNDERAGE WIZARDS FIGHTING THE DARK LORD AND HIS DEATH EATERS.Not… one… single… kid? All the kids who WEREN’T in Harry’s year and didn’t have the same level of hate/interaction with him? Even though the “hell year” with Snape in charge saw lots of favortism towards the Slytherins, not ONE thought… this is like, wrong?Malfoy wasn’t even there for his year 7. He wasn’t around to kind of “lead” the poison against Potter. And people like Pansy Parkinson saw that Draco had gone through misery in year 6 and then, for all they knew, was dead! He vanished! Or went bad! Rowling uses characters like Snape and Umbridge to say “people are complicated” and “not all evil wears a death eater mask.” Umbridge in book 7 pisses me off, too. I think she’s a LOUSY character. Not a “good villain,” she was terrible. Okay, fine. In book 7 she is gleefully serving wizard fascism and executing it. It’s a bit much that she doesn’t have a single redeemable quality. Snape is selfish to the core but at least the point where he realizes the horror of all this shit. But not one Slytherin got to be “complicated.” OR presented as “dude, we’re KIDS.” It’s maddening and disappointing.
Umbridge to me is like the dickhead establishment Republicans who were so eager to suck Trump off. I can buy her shittiness.But it would have been good character growth for Draco to show up and turn on the Death Eaters after the way they basically took over his house and held his family under house arrest.
That Draco does not redeem himself is a mystifying choice by JKR. “Child bully finds he’s more than that” is a great plot; “child bully becomes an adult threat” is acceptable, I guess. “Child bully turns out not to matter much” is…what?(Note that Joffrey has that one moment in battle when you think he might make the turn, but ends up being convinced to hide instead. But at least he ends up fully horrible.)
This is why a lot of people appreciate Tom Felton. Starting in HBP, he did a really good job of making Draco seem desperate and in over his head, and that wasn’t really in the script.
The “Slytherins are the bad ones” is such a lazy trope I was borderline impressed she never deviated from it. A whole group sorted as “the assholes.” Personally, I would have loved some nuance – Gryffindor are brave and loyal but can also be reckless and blind in their loyalty; ravenclaw are smart but can be arrogant and disinterested in leaving the ivory tower; hufflepuff are friendly and kind, but too trusting to see themselves getting betrayed; and slytherin are cunning and duplicitous, but also resourceful and good at reading people. Instead, it’s “these 3 houses are good and slytherins are always and forever evil monster things you can indiscriminately hate, its cool.” Christ, even Liz Cheney stood up to the GOP, I agree that *one* Slytherin at the *very least* could have thought “ya know what, if this thing doesn’t work out for ol Voldemort, its probably in my best interests to be on the winning side and based on what is going on here, maybe it makes sense to fight with the Good Guys.” But nope.
Before they revamped the Pottmore site to the dull Wizarding World, you used to get a “Prefect’s Letter” from the house you’ve sorted into. The Slythern one was *hysterical*. It was entirely #notallSlytherins. Oh, it IS still there. Here’s the link: https://www.wizardingworld.com/outcome/slytherin Here’s my favorite bit: Now, there are a few things you should know about Slytherin – and a few you should forget. Firstly, let’s dispel a few myths. You might have heard rumours about Slytherin house – that we’re all into the Dark Arts, and will only talk to you if your great-grandfather was a famous wizard, and rubbish like that. Well, you don’t want to believe everything you hear from competing houses. I’m not denying that we’ve produced our share of Dark wizards, but so have the other three houses – they just don’t like admitting it. And yes, we have traditionally tended to take students who come from long lines of witches and wizards, but nowadays you’ll find plenty of people in Slytherin house who have at least one Muggle parent. Here’s a little-known fact that the other three houses don’t bring up much: Merlin was a Slytherin. Yes, Merlin himself, the most famous wizard in history! He learned all he knew in this very house! Do you want to follow in the footsteps of Merlin? Or would you rather sit at the old desk of that illustrious ex-Hufflepuff, Eglantine Puffett, inventor of the Self-Soaping Dishcloth? I didn’t think so.
If you want to treat the The Cursed Child as canon, she kinda starts to interrogate that a tiny bit there (spoiler I guess: Harry’s son ends up in Slytherin) but not in, like, any sort of interesting or intelligent way.
The craziest part of the story is that in a high school full horny teens, there was nobody in Slytherin house attractive enough any person in any of the other houses wanted to get with them. We see members of the other three houses hooking up with each other throughout the story, but Slytherin keeps it all in-house. It all works better if either Cho Chang or Lavender Brown had been a Slytherin. If Cho’s a Slytherin, the story could’ve actually explored the idea that Harry might’ve in some way belonged in Slytherin, as the Sorting Hat claimed. There would also have been someone other than Slughorn to stick around during the siege.
No, Slugsy definitely fought. One of my favorite characters.
My kids insist to me that Slytherin wasn’t supposed to be the “evil” house; that that there were virtuous Slytherin. They were really more like, what, the cunning group? But in the movies they’re all evil.
Deathly Hallows felt both rushed and overwritten. Like she had much more story to tell or make it even longer but just wanted to get it done and over with. However, a certain other fantasy writer should probably have taken notes about how Rowling finished the series without taking long delays in between
To be fair, when you send the Slytherins to the dungeon you’re just sending them to their dorm…
“it’s always annoyed me that Harry dueled Voldemort alone in the courtyard rather than being surrounded by his community of loved ones.”Thank you! That last battle was a mess of incoherent and BORING special fx, and lacked the exultation and emotional lift of the book!
I didn’t care for the movies after Yates took the reins. I’m on the opposite end of Tom’s assessment and feel like Deathly Hallows 2 is a giant shrug, just going through the motions of the script to finish this thing (Being all climax really hurts its structure as a movie.) The last half hour is particularly egregious, especially the final battle. Harry and Voldemort kind of hug at each other while flying at the screen (so the studio can justify that 3D upcharge at the box office,) they land in the Hogwarts Auxiliary Faculty Parking Lot and have a terrifically anticlimactic battle with Voldemort looking like he’s succumbing to a terminal case of indigestion. (It takes a special level of bungling to to make “How does the good guy beat the bad guy at the very end?” weird and confusing.)
Of course, the book ending is anticlimactic as well: Harry tells Voldemort he can’t win because of Wandlore*, Voldemort scoffs. Spells are cast, one immediately backfires, and the most evil wizard of all time just drops dead unceremoniously. But, for whatever reason, all that worked on the page for me. No final monologue, no grand exit, no chance to look at Potter and ask some rhetorical question/share a moment of reflection on his way out. Voldemort is supremely confident in his choices and just dies. Having it all take place in the Great Hall, one of the most iconic locations in the series, in front of the entire extended universe of characters we’ve come to know over 7 books, goes a long way to making a kind of inelegant ending really pop.
*(The whole Elder Wand switching hands mechanic is needlessly complicated in both book and movie form. I mean, the introduction of the Deathly Hallows all around is clumsy as Hell; “Harry, I know you became fantastically uncurious about the magic world after the first half of the first book, but certainly you’ve heard of the Deathly Hallows! They’re part of the most important, beloved and well-known stories in all of wizarding! That’s why we’re all just now talking about them, for the first time, right now!”)
Interesting. I had the opposite reaction to the anticlimax. I was getting increasingly bored of Voldemort’s monologuing, eyes may have been glazing over, and he was basically dead before I knew what happened. I may have had to reread, like “what the fuck? Did I miss something?”
(The whole Elder Wand switching hands mechanic is needlessly complicated in both book and movie form. I mean, the introduction of the Deathly Hallows all around is clumsy as Hell; “Harry, I know you became fantastically uncurious about the magic world after the first half of the first book, but certainly you’ve heard of the Deathly Hallows! They’re part of the most important, beloved and well-known stories in all of wizarding! That’s why we’re all just now talking about them, for the first time, right now!”)Yeah. Strangely the split final film blunts that because artificially cutting the final book in two lessens the feeling that this is just something that was pulled out of Rowling’s backside at the 11th hour.* Given that the Deathly Hallows book came out before Halfblood Prince started shooting, they could’ve spent a tiny bit of that movie making wandlore look like a logically integrated part of the story. At the very least they could’ve fixed the biggest problem, by having Draco walk out of Hogwarts with Dumbledore’s wand in hand, then have Harry disarm him before Snape whups his ass. At least that way Draco and Harry, the Elder Wand’s “owners,” have each actually touched the wand before the climax of the series, and the audience doesn’t have to go through the spurious mental math of “So Harry disarms Draco at Castle Malfoy while Draco’s using a whole different wand, and the Elder Wand, which has never been touched by or taken from Malfoy and is miles away in Dumbledore’s tomb, knows this has happened and switches allegiances? Right…”Instead of making things better, the Deathly Hallows movies actually muddy the whole thing up even more with their supremely stupid visual representation of wandlore, which involves a CGI closeup into the wand getting stress fractures when Voldemort uses it (we see this in DH1 when he uses Lucius’s wand, and again with the Elder Wand in DH2). What is this supposed to tell us? It’d make sense if the wand exploded in Voldemort’s hand in the final battle (it’d also make more sense as a way for Voldemort to die) but the wand survives and is theoretically fully functional in Harry’s hands…until he snaps it in two.*(It’s reverse-engineered, and not very well. How the heck does it not turn out that the resurrection stone is Mad Eye Moody’s eye, rather than some random Gaunt family heirloom-turned-horcrux? That would at least explain why the eye easily saw through the “unbeatable” deathly hallows invisibility cloak…)
Yeah, the part 1 resonated a lot more with me than 2.
The film bungles the ending pretty much entirely in a way that’s baffling. Rowling is far from a great writer, but she knew what she was doing with the end of the book (the epilogue is pretty heinous, but fits with her ideas about the series). The movie takes out all the thematic closure and just goes with cgi, and then Harry tossing his wand off a bridge.But then Yates was always a very underwhelming director, with no real sense for or of magic. One can’t help but wonder what the end of the series would have looked like helmed by someone with some imagination.
I know this is an unpopular opinion but I think Cuaron is the wrong person for movies like these. I get that he brings a very distinct flavor that you don’t get in big hollywood block busters, but he is more interested in making a unique film than really dialing in on the characters and their journey. I always felt like Prisoner of Azkaban is more of a harry potter spectacle than a movie.
My main gripes with Azkaban are that the best book gets the shortest runtime and Cuaron loses the bit where Sirius is hovering over Ron’s bed looking for Peter (though we don’t know that yet). That film could have done with an extra Gary Oldman scene.
I could use a longer cut of Prisoner of Azkaban tbh. I love it, but we never got enough scenes of the kids just in class, the movies, by their nature are so plot focused they drive out almost everything else.
I’ll take it farther and say that I found Deathly Hallows Pt 1 rather unconscionable—both as a money grab and as a movie that was not very good. Given that some of the other books had entire plotlines cut out to fit the running time of a single movie, there’s no reason the final book needed to be hammered out to nearly 5 hours of total screen time.
I think the Hunger Games merited a mention as a reasonably successful YA adaptation in the wake of Harry Potter.
I was reasonably entertained by The Maze Runner, though not enough to see the sequel.
Same with Divergent.
Splitting the third book into two films then cancelling the second one has to be a bit of a caveat about how well Divergent did.
Didn’t Divergent have to wrap up as a TV movie on FX or the superstation or something like that? I’m not sure I’d count that as a success.
Even better: There simply wasn’t a conclusion to the film series. They didn’t shoot the third and fourth films back-to-back, as so many other YA adaptations had done. After the third film tanked, Lionsgate announced that they were going to do the planned final film as a movie for a premium service (I wanna say Starz, since it’s owned by Lionsgate,) with the potential to spin that off into a TV series. Shortly after those plans were announced, Shaliene Woodley publicly stated (in so many words) there was no way in hell that she was doing a glorified TV movie. All those plans collapsed pretty quickly.
It also does not help that the last book in the series is very divisive amongst fans. There isn’t really the kind of happy ending audiences not familiar with the book would expect, and a number of book fans would NOT want to see that.
Dayum. But good for her. The first Divergent is reasonably entertaining but after a couple of viewings you realize SO MUCH of the movie (and the sequel) is “drink this potion and something will happen.” Plus the world-building made NO sense.
Hunger Games would have be perfectly fine as a stand alone movie, but it was too big of a hit for them to not make the second movie, which is just a repeat of the first one. Then they decided to Harry Potter the third one and split it up for no reason. The series limped to the ending, with audiences saying, “We didn’t want four of these” making the last movie by far the lowest grossing in the franchise. Plus, dragging it out meant that Philip Seymour Hoffman died before he could film his part, and the end of Mockingjay Part 2 where they try to dance around that is just unbearably awkward.
Yeah, Hunger Games was just needlessly milking it, and the last film is the weakest of the series, imo. If they had just left Mockingjay as one entity, I think it could’ve been a pretty good flick.
You could tell by the end that Jennifer Lawrence wanted out pretty badly
Ditto for X-Men First Class trilogy.
I like Lawrence as an actor but she has a bad habit of checking the fuck out before the end of a franchise.I find Natalie Portman has similar ‘don’t give a fuck’ vibes in the wrong project.
Good for Lawrence that she’s no longer doing franchises.
I’ve found myself wondering if Lawrence just had way too much success at way too young of an age. I mean, she was like 22 when she won an Oscar, and she became a mega-star built not only on Hunger Games but her overall celebrity persona. I get the impression nothing really challenges her anymore. Maybe it’s a good thing if she takes a break from acting and celebrity life.
Part of the issue is everyone just seems sort of over it and that shows through on the film. By this point the buzz for those YA adaptations was over and I get the sense everyone just wanted to make it to the finish line to fulfill contracts.
Agreed. And the third book isnt great itself, much less making it two parts for no good reason other than $. Thr first flick is a case where I DO enjoy the film more than the book.
The second movie and book are both very good imo. Definitely agree that they split up the third one for no reason; if anything, there’s less going on in that book than the other two, and it’s less interesting.
Yeah I think the series absolutely peaked in Catching Fire. It was great: it was a story that actually earned its serious tone. It evolved from the kind of gimmicky first movie to tell a more interesting story with a much wider scope. Production design was *much* better (I love the contrast between the decadent Capital citizens and their Stormtrooper-esque military forces), and actors like Phillip Seymour Hoffman definitely elevated the material. Also I love how the end of the movie is just focused on Katniss as we watch her break down, then mentally fortify herself for what she needs to do, all in total silence. Pretty bold ending.
It did seem strange that no mention was given to the Hunger Games as it’s the only YA adaptation that even comes close in box office terms. As evidenced by the fact there’s going to be one of these articles on Catching Fire in a few weeks.
Hunger Games was more its own thing – I think the “kids in a dystopia” YA genre is different than the “magic chosen one” YA genre.
Hunger Games came the year after Potter finished – I think Tom here was concentrating on those they came and went during Potter’s decade in the sun. I assumed stuff like Hunger Games, Maze Runner and Divergent (along with one film wonders like The Host and Beautiful Creatures) were what he was referring to when he mentioned Twilight spinning off it’s own YA trend.
Also the Group Hopper was really underrated.
I was annoyed that The Dark Is Rising was lumped in there. The movie absolutely sucked but the book series is fantastic, and it was published in the 60s and 70s. I’ve never read of a direct connection but I have to believe Rowling had read those books at some point and took some inspiration from them. It never had a chance as a movie, though. But it could make for a great series now.
That Twilight clip is literally the most insane thing I’ve ever seen. I’m completely floored that that was a YA film ostensibly for 12-14 year olds. The body horror of Bella’s back practically snapping in half, her gaunt face, Edward with a bloody mouth holding his bloody child having just eaten it out of Bella’s body…. What the hell man!
So the story here is that, on their wedding night, Edward impregnated Bella with his vampirized super-sperm. (Note that there’s also a thing here about how he leaves bruises all over Bella’s body because of how hard he goes during their lovemaking, but this does not bother her.) Bella’s pregnancy is accelerated and lasts about two weeks, and the vampires are concerned that the half-vampire baby inside her will kill her, which naturally leads to the most ham-fisted anti-abortion argument scene this side of a Pure Flix Entertainment movie. As you saw, Bella does almost die during childbirth, so just after this Edward turns her into a vampire to save her life.
If that’s not enough, shortly after this the other guy who has been pining over Bella sees her newborn baby for the first time and romantically pair-bonds with it for life. But it’s okay, because she’s a halfling vampire baby she’ll mature to legal age within a few years and physically be 19 years old for centuries!
IT’S FINE. ALL OF THIS IS TOTALLY FINE.
I refuse to believe that any of that is real.
I made an off-hand joke about Twilight the other day and then had to explain everything you just typed to my wife, who grew increasingly baffled and upset as I went on. “So the werewolf wants to fuck a baby?!”“No, no, he just bonds with the baby and will fuck it when it gets older, which is also very weird and not ok.” (and only knowing about Twilight third hand, I didn’t even know that the baby would age super quick so he might actually end up fucking a 5 year old that just looks 19, which ohmigod how did this get published AND filmed?)
And it was all written by a Mormon.
I don’t know (or care) if you’re kidding. I’ll be repeating that.
I realized after I typed that Mormon thing that I should have fact-checked. Something in the back of my head told me to. Let’s see. And I was correct. I beleive I had heard this before somebody told me a story about finger banging in one of the books. I tried to confirm that with a Google search and all that comes up is fanfic. Regardless, there eventually was sex that ended up with the sparkly vanpire chewing his child out of it’s mothers stomach. Apparently when they first had sex she was bruised and beaten very bad. Where does an LDS person get this material? I know that mormon teens have found workarounds to sexual gratification without sex, um soaking? I guess that’s the new “just the tip”. This shit is wierd. Meyer’s membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shaped her novels: there are no drinking, smoking, or explicit sex scenes, and the characters Edward and Bella in her Twilight series remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Themes consistent with her religion, including agency, mortality, temptation, and eternal life, are prominent in her work.[3] Meyer’s work has been criticized for her overly-simplistic writing style, and feminists assert that the novel encourages traditional gender roles and that furthermore, Bella and Edward’s romance has signs of an abusive relationship. Despite this criticism, Meyer considers herself a feminist. Meyer’s stories have also received praise and she has acquired a fan following.
I actually knew about soaking. I’m a big fan of the podcast “Ice Cream Social” and ex-Mormons have written in. It is described as “the least satisfying sexual act on Earth.”
I’m sorry, but if you are soaking you’ve broken the seal. That’s more than “just the tip”. I guess it’s about not thrusting? What if you get a cramp or an itch and have to shift a bit to address it? Are you not creating friction that goes beyond just a nice soak? Do they wear protection? Is it like a careful process to make sure you are doing it just right to remain chaste? What’s the fucking point?I worked with a couple of Mormon boys in college. When the rest of the guys were talking about hot girls they would join in a talk about how much they would make out with whatever girls we were talking about. This coming after any or all of the other guy’s lewd and overly descriptive comments about the woman was just too much. However, those boys all had AR-15s. I always wished they had some other outlet to relieve some of that young man tension. Let ‘em soak.
I just started reading Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven. I know every religion/cult/group has it’s horror stories and weirdness, and it’s one of my great joys in life which ones people accept and don’t, but I have no idea why Mormon get as much of a pass as they do.
That’s a great book. I find the odd beliefs facinating as well. They used to do a really good job keeping things under wrap. I think Under the Banner let a lot out. With the internet it’s too hard. They are only slightly less wierd than Scientologists.My ex was some kind of a Mormon princess. She was related to the third of fourth church president, who may or may not have been in that book, however, in that book is her great, great uncle or cousin several timers removed. Jeddy the Sledgehammer. The LDS muscle. That’s who my ex was related to. She made me read that book.
Not up to that part yet. Wow. I’m only at them getting kicked out of Missouri. That’s a remarkable story. The way some of those compounds twist sister/mother/stepmother/grandmother is amazing and terrifying. I agree, somehow Mitt Romney and Andy Reid and BYU put a better face on everything.
They have some bloody skeletons in the closet. I don’t want to spoil the story that they really try to avoid talking about. Big Love was a fun show if you’ve spent any time in Utah. I’m not sure how much was exageerated but I recomend it.
Awesome. I’ve never actually been that far west. I’ll definitely be returning to this and messaging you as I get deeper and finish the book. I’m up to the Mormons getting kicked out of Missouri now, but I should have more time to read now that the semester’s over (I hope…)
Message me any time. I’m not a real LDS subject matter expert, but I was in a long term relationship with a Mormon princess as I mentioned earlier. I used to think it was funny to sign people up for info about the church so they would get constant LDS representatives to their door. She told me if I ever did that she would kill me. She was sort of hidden by her parents like the Skywalker children. She said they would never leave her alone if they found her. Both her parents left SLC as teenagers to get the Hell out and eventual met later and got married. Apparently, my ex’s mother had to fight hard to get excommunicated because of her heritage. They did not want to let her go.
I know entirely too much. Thanks to Rifftrax I’ve seen all the Twilight movies at least once. I still have not watched Godfather Part II.As far as how it got made, because it started a pretty standard teen angst romance with a very en vogue fantasy twist. By the time Stephanie Meyers’ “unique worldview” really started to come through and dominate the narrative, the money train had already left the station and nobody wanted to pull the brake.
No shame. I’ve only seen parts of The Godfather movies but thanks to Rifftrax and my own weird tastes I have watched plenty of garbage ranging from mainstream crap like Firewall and the first Twilight (“Line!”) that I only watched because of Riffs to the far fringes of trash cinema. Hell, I watched Miami Connection, R.O.T.O.R., and Samurai Cop on their own BEFORE Rifftrax ever got a hold of them!
Stephenie pulled a lot from Buffy and True Blood, so she had decent plot points in the mix occasionally.
We’re talking Twi-Moms here. Rationality does not enter the picture.
I don’t know what you just wrote but I have literally never been more turned on.
Also, he’s an old man who knocks up a teenager.
Of all the ‘split-the-last-book-into-two’ I would argue this has been the most successful. And the most justified given the source material. The final film is probably my fave of the entire series. And the emotional climax in Harry witnessing Snape’s montage of memories – with the editing and the music – is one of its finest moments.I feel kind of bad for David Yates; I thought he did a great job shepherding the last films through with a consistent and engaging tone…and now he’s fated to crush under the weight of increasingly obnoxious and superfluous Fantastic Beasts films.
I really hated that Tarzan movie. If you think a traditional Tarzan adventure is too offensive by today’s standards that you need to make it about the slave trade and human rights abuses, OK I guess, but don’t then make it PG-13 and stuff it with tacky CG action scenes in case you want a Burger King tie-in or whatever.
Lol it’s almost as if the giant conglomerates that own movie studios way to make money off movies is stuck in the 90s. Except for Disney anyhow, but they’ve always been a little different for better or worse.
I really hated that Tarzan movie. It was muddy and awful. The CGI was dark and ghostlike, so there was never a chance you would think those were real animals. And yeah, the plot was ridiculous. Even more than any of the actual novels.
I think this might be the only split final chapter where the final movie is better than the penultimate one. Even though I like it, Deathly Hallows 1 doesn’t really work as a movie, it’s all set up and the end feels just like a stopping point than like the completion of a story. For all that DH2 is backloaded with action, it has a real story with a beginning, middle, and end.
DH1 just feels needlessly long to me. The only interesting thing that happens in the interminable camping scenes is Harry and Hermione slow dancing to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, which was bizarre and yet still kinda worked.
It always amused me that people credit the Potter movies with inventing that “two-part franchise finale” format, when The Matrix films did it years earlier. It’s just that no one wants to acknowledge that because then you’d have to remember the Matrix sequels.
The Matrix had sequels?
It had a sequel, and then there was a fight scene that somehow lasted another 150 minutes.
I think it invented it in the sense of splitting the source material into two. If you are going to make a case for the Matrix, I’d make one for Back to the Future.
Back to the Future did it before the Matrix sequels.
Were Revolutions and Reloaded supposed to be one chapter? I know they filmed simultaneously and debuted the same year.
matrix was very, very, very clearly trying to ape star wars trilogy format. you wouldn’t say empire and jedi are a ‘two part franchise finale’ would you? i think there’s quite a big difference between what is essentially a 4 hour mega movie and a middle part with a cliffhanger.
Matrix 2 and 3 were filmed together as a single movie, then split into two films that were released in the same year. Empire and Jedi were two separate productions made years apart. It’s not the same thing.
they were filmed at the same time, but not ‘as a single movie’. that’s just incorrect. they were always two movies with two scripts.
How is the Matrix different from the original Star Wars trilogy? Harry Potter was one book split into to, the Matrix was just two movies.
The two Matrix sequels were filmed at the same time like one big movie, then split into two films released six months apart. Whereas each Star Wars episode has always been its own separate production.
The noteworthy thing about Harry Potter’s split is that it takes one book and turns it into two movies. The Matrix sequels were always written to be two movies. The former matters because it kicked off a trend of stretching popular source material, often thinning out a story and breaking it’s narrative flow.
The latter is a production technique that doesn’t really have an impact on the actual story.
Does The Matrix count as doing the same thing? I liken it more to how the Back to the Future sequels did it. Shot back-to-back, with the one cliffhanger-ing into the other, but they still both have beginnings middles and ends. Deathly Hallows has a literal split story (and I’m in the minority of thinking neither works because both are incomplete).
I rewatched the trilogy last year, the Matrix sequels hold up pretty well.I wouldn’t say they’re as good as the original, but they’re severely underrated.
I think it worked well, and was necessary, in the Hunger Games series too. When I’d first read that final book, I thought it was really rushed and would have been better split into two books that could have both been more fleshed out. I was glad when they said they would do just that with the movies, and I think it was for the best.
That Snape memory scene and the cartoon scene with the 3 brothers was phenomal. I’m a grown man and I teared up a bit during the Snape scene.
The 3 Brothers sequence was some of the most beautiful animation I had ever seen. I could watch a whole movie of that.
Agreed except that they left out why Snape and Lily’s friendship ended. I saw it on opening night and was chatting with some kids who hadn’t read the books. I ran into them after the movie ended me and they asked me “But why did they stop being friends?” But yes, that was a gorgeous sequence.
I don’t feel bad for him. His movies were largely dull and colorless, literally and metaphorically, and outside of my enjoyment of Hallows part 1 they’re… mehhhhhhh
Funny, I’d say this handled the “two part finale” thing among the worst and fell into the same trap a lot of movies that try to do that fall into: namely having a second part that feels more like an extended action climax than an actual movie. The Matrix Revolutions and The Battle of the Five Armies had the same problem. The Hunger Games probably would have had the same problem if not for its extended denouement after the final battle, which is awkward in its own way. If you want to count it, the one movie that kind of pulled it off was probably Avengers Infinity War/Endgame, which managed to pull off the trick without anyone realizing it at first.
Potter is one of my major pop culture blindspots. More of a Henry Screamer guy I guess. It honestly didn’t occur to me at the time that Eragon, for example, was a Potter cash-in. Percy Jackson was hard to miss though.I think the Narnia movies were more of an attempt to cash in on Lord of the Rings than Potter. The problem with doing a Narnia series, from a commercial perspective, is that the first book is about ten times more famous than the others.
I think the Narnia movies were more of an attempt to cash in on Lord of the Rings than Potter. The problem with doing a Narnia series, from a commercial perspective, is that the first book is about ten times more famous than the others.
As a kid I found reading the other books in the series more a chore as they went on.
I’m not even sure I read them all in the right order, pretty certain I never made it to The Last Battle.
I read my son The Lion the With and the Wardrobe, which he loved, but we got halfway through Prince Caspian and he got sick of keeping track of the ancillary characters while the characters from the first book sat around listening to a story.
Oddly, I enjoyed the film version of Prince Caspian more. The book is fairly boring. Dawn treader is great. Horse and his boy… Exists. Silver chair is probably the most profound. Nephew is silly fun, but later “reading order” sets put it first and it’s the worst place for it —- it explicitly depends on you having at least read Wardrobe. There was a point where last battle meant a lot to me, primarily for parts of its ending. It’s a weird, offputting book. It has an interesting message in its depiction of how people get taken in by dupe religion,and some curiously inclusive ideas of “god” at the end. But it’s too weird and too ugly.
The boxed set I got for my son had them in in-universe chronological order, which is absolutely ridiculous. As you point out, the Magician’s Nephew only works as a story if you read it after the original book. And the original book has by far the most engaging characters and plot.I’d actually forgotten how many references to the Bible there are in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe – it confused me a bit that he was the atheist and Tolkien (whose stories are purely high fantasy) was the devout Catholic, until I noticed that Lewis treats Christianity purely as a mythos, and he mingles with Greek mythology and stuff that he made up. Tolkien has a mysterious higher power that works through emissaries on earth. Lewis has a magical Jesus-lion who shows up when he damn well pleases.
I don’t know where you got the idea that C.S. Lewis was an atheist but he very much was not. Check out his Wikipedia page.
Lewis was an atheist in his earlier life, but I’m pretty sure he was a committed Catholic by the time he wrote the Narnia books, partially as a result of his friendship with Tolkien.
Church of England, but yes. He was fully committed to his faith once he converted. Surprised by Joy is his very strange sort of autobiography/story of how he came to faith.There’s something charming about his stories and other stories about he, Tolkien, and some of their other friends taking walks through the university outdoors, puffing pipes, having artistic, philosophical, and theological debates into the wee hours. lol
And the one guy who was like “no! Not another fucking word about elves!”
Lewis was far from an atheist. He’s a famed theologian, whose religious writing was, probably still is, hugely influential. Mere Christianity still checks out regularly from my library, almost as much or more than The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. I’m also told the Screwtape Letters are excellent.
I think it would depend on how you approach Screwtape.It’s one of his more famous works among evangelicals, buuuuuuut: it also gets taken quite LITERALLY by a huge chunk of believers. As in, yes, this is how the devil works, this is basically real life, etc etc.That’s not the entire audience, and I don’t think it was the audience back in the day. There is an audiobook version read by John Cleese! It’s delightful!As a look into the psychology of selfishness, of choices to do good or bad, but specifically how humans can get tripped up by the evil of banality and mundanity, I think it was merit. But you have to read as fiction with a point, not… a tract.
There is an audiobook version read by John Cleese! It’s delightful! Oh, it is! Like the best audio books, it brings a new depth to the book – I’d read it and thought it was okay and amusing. Listened to the Cleese recording and thought it was amazing and hilarious.
OMG! John Cleese as Screwtape?Perfect casting — I must find a copy of this.
Janet, The Screwtape Letters is actually one of Lewis’s best books — probably because he was writing about a Senior Demon of Hell “schooling” his junior demon nephew, it was really witty and occasionally disturbing, in that way that a smartass kid who went to a strict boarding school would talk about his experiences there.
I really need to get around to it. My sister raved about it decades ago and I’ve just kept putting it off.
I remember it actually being fun to read — and, even as a nice Christian teenager, I didn’t see much that both “fun” and “church-approved”.You might actually enjoy it more as the John Cleese audiobook, because the second I heard that I went, “Not since Robert Downey, Jr. was hired to play Tony Stark have I heard tell of such perfect casting.”
I’ve seen those sets. Ridiculous! I don’t know of any scenario where you should take on the prequel first, but LWW is explicitly crammed with “HEY, THIS IS HOW THIS THING HAPPENED!!!”I like your take that Lewis treats Christianity as mythos, mixed up with Greek, Norse (he and Tolkien both looooooved Norse mythology), and “stuff that he made up.” “magical jesus-lion whos up when he damn well pleases.” DYING love it
Yeah, I really felt the Christian themes of the movies were very in-your-face so when I started reading the books, I was surprised by how nuanced and…non-preachy everything was. Some of it, like the treatment of multiple dimensions, could even be considered blasphemous by the super-religious. So I went in thinking “Yes, Aslan is Jesus, I get it, this will have no subtlety” and came out of it finding the religious aspects of the books quite refreshing.
I really appreciate this comment.Also: Souz-a-ma-phonnnnne
The Last Battle caused quite a bit of controversy in my super-evangelical circles growing up because there’s a passage where a character who’s coded as Muslim is welcomed into heaven simply for being a good person. You had people accusing Lewis of being a satan-worshipper and all sorts of rubbish. There’s also a scene where some dwarves imprison themselves in a dark stable, unwilling to see the beauty that’s all around them, which I always took as an explicit satire of fundamentalism.
It’s based on a letter ge wrote to a young fan, where Lewis agreed that the prequel goes first. Though it was obvious that he was just being nice to a kid, not speaking seriously.
If I’m remembering this right… Tolkien almost convinced Lewis that Wardrobe didn’t work – He had Christianity, he had the pagan-ish White Witch, AND he had Santa Claus. So the mythologies were all mixed up and didn’t make sense.Lewis thought about it, then said “fuck it” and sent it in for publication anyway. All right, he might not have said “fuck it”. But maybe…!
Yeah I’m learning from this thread that my secondhand understanding of his religiosity was incorrect. But I still don’t think that Christianity has primacy over the rest of the myth in the Narnia stories, which is interesting.
I would agree with this.
He’s not a tame lion.
C.S. Lewis wasn’t atheist — he was devoutly Church of England!
I read all of the Narnia books during my English lit grad program, which had us reading such dark stuff that i wanted something light. Something about Silver Chair really stuck with me. I never found anyone else who latched onto it. What struck you as profound about it? Last Battle is very strange and oddly inappropriate for children but there are some stream-of-consciousness passages that are utterly gorgeous.
Actually, let me rephrase. I haven’t read Silver Chair in years, but it is my ex-partner’s favorite of the series. She loves it. She’s explained to me why before, but… I don’t remember. Eeesh. haha. Dawn Treader probably stuck with me more than any of the others besides LWW, and the ending of Last Battle. Circles within circles… very eastern mysticism, almost. Almost Sufi.
Ahhhh. I like Silver Chair because it’s dark and bonkers in a settled way. The heroes save the day, but it wont be enough. They still run out of time, and they all knew they would. Decay is starting to settle in at the fringes of Narnia. If Last Battle is something of a dystopia (it’s certainly apocalyptic), Silver Chair shows what led to it, which is actually very rare.
That’s a really amazing take. I think I’m due for a re-read. Long overdue.
Silver Chair is probably the strongest in terms of Having An Actual Plot. Eustace and Jill arrive in Narnia and are told, “Hey, the Caspian’s son has been kidnapped, go rescue him” and that’s what they do. The rest of the books are more “children arrive in Narnia and some fantastic stuff happens” but it more just happens around them rather than they have a real purpose in the story beyond experiencing it. Last Battle is especially true in this regard.
Silver Chair is my mother’s favorite of the series—mine less so. It was so gloomy and underground. When I got older and realized the Lady of the Green Kirtle was likely based on La Belle Dame Sans Merci, I did like that touch.
The green witch was the weakest element of the book tbh. After all the fanfare and mythos of the white queen, its like oh word, we have another witch lol. I think maybe some of the imagery in the book struck me as being a little American, with the swamps and wasteland. I have trouble connecting to a lot of fantasy because so much of it is rooted in a culturally European, implicitly Christian knights and post-Arthurian stuff; that’s not my background at all. But I can go for depressed kids on a dead prairie, i guess.
After all the fanfare and mythos of the white queen, its like oh word, we have another witch lol.I’m trying to remember (I’ve read the books exhaustively but not recently) but I think a character references that saying something like “those Northern witches, they’re all the same.” So at least they address it in-universe.
I suppose. And I guess it rolls into what I said above about Narnia falling into predicted entropy. But as a villain who held a prince hostage, she should have been more.
I liked the recent Narnia movies, especially Lion, but… that BBC tv series from the late 80s is really good. Super low budget, and they – wisely I think, for the way they were pacing the series – combined Prince Caspian and Dawn Treader into one episode. They got all the way to The Silver Chair, which I think was the best of the lot. Tom Baker as Puddleglum, do I have to say more? As I said, the new ones are fine, I just wish the BBC series had gone further. I would love to have seen them do Horse and His Boy, which is a nice side-trip story, and Magician’s Nephew, which is a pretty intricate story and shows what a good world-builder Lewis could be. The Last Battle has way too much overt Christian stuff in it (yes, it’s in all the books but comes to a head in Battle) to probably make a decent television OR blockbuster adaptation.
I wish I could stamp out every attempt to re-order literary/cinematic works by the in-universe order of events. It never works; those stories gain their power from what the audience has already seen, not from being part of a fictitious history. No, don’t watch Captain America: First Avenger first, and don’t watch that Godfather/GF2 cut with the flashbacks from 2 at the beginning. The Machete order thing is the rare case that might be better than release order, and even that one isn’t pure order-of-events.
I’m not even sure I read them all in the right order, pretty certain I never made it to The Last Battle.When I finally got to The Last Battle and it all clicked that it was a religious story, I was disappointed. So wait, the last book is the rapture? Boorrrrrrrrinnnnnggggg. I know, I know, I was too slow in picking up on it.
I read them with my daughter, and other than the first one, The Horse and His Boy (which only barely has anything to do with Narnia) was her favorite.
HHB is great! Aravis is such a fantastic character!
I remember going back to the library after reading one or two of the next books, and instead of getting the next book in the series, I just read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe again.
The Last Battle is fucked UP. Great book but I was sobbing wildly as a ten year old at certain parts. Very, very dark–Shift (the Big bad) is basically the Anti-Christ.
Certain parts such as a certain bear not understanding a certain something? I was 9-year-old inconsolable.
Aw, man—I’m tearing up now, I’d forgotten about that part (although yes, cried my eyes out at that as well), I was thinking about the part with the horses. Absolutely heart-breaking. I know some people don’t like the last section of that book (and other aspects of it—there’s a lot to unpack) but seeing the bear again made me stop crying. And the last part…“The holidays are over. The holidays are here.” It’s such a beautiful moment but it’s a lot for a kid to process. Great book though.
I did read them all, but I remember as a kid I found Prince Caspian and Horse & His Boy a real chore to get through. Later, re-reading as an adult, I realized that at least part of the “problem” with Caspian is a good half of the book is backstory. Like, the Pevensies get to Narnia, and they meet Caspian and his companions, and then we get MANY chapters of Caspian’s whole deal up until that point, and there really isn’t any tension, because… we already know he’s with them, and you just want the story to actually get started. (Plus, Aslan’s “lesson” to the children can be boiled down to, “Hey, sometimes I’m going to be a mysterious jerk, and you have to cope with that.”)
SPOILER: They die, but everything’s cool.
I’d imagine it’s also a bit harder to maintain a consistent plotline throughout a Narnia film series, as IIRC they sort of bounce around in order a bit and at times follow different main characters rather than being a Harry Potter kind of thing where you have a main character and recurring supporting cast developing a narrative all the way through. With the Narnia stories, the origin story was the second-to-last book.
There’s a reason the first one is the most famous – the other Narnia books are very hit and miss.
Agreed. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually finished that series because some of the books just did not do it for me at all.
I liked Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but I barely remember any of the other non-Wardrobe ones. My kids like the first two movies. I’m pretty sure they made a third film, but we haven’t watched it.
The third movie is, at best, *ok*. Part of the challenge is the book is largely a bunch of threaded vignettes, where they go from island to island and have mini-adventures, but there isn’t a real PLOT. So the movie tries to craft a Save Narnia plot out of nothing and it isn’t really much to it besides that.
The Horse and His Boy or GTFO!
The Narnia books start to get increasingly weird and stupid after the 3rd one so it makes sense that the movies kinda fizzled out after that. The extremely literal (and too blatant according to Tolkien) religious themes are also kind of hard to adapt into something that doesn’t become a christian themed movie.
Y’know, growing up Christian, it was obvious what the Christian themes were… But while many critics like to claim they’re “direct allegory,” they’re not. Anyway I’ve been surprised how many people I’ve met, co-workers or acquaintances, who didn’t know they were about God until it was pointed out. I don’t think it’s strictly true that the religious themes are a detriment to adaptation. Ymmv
I forget who this was, but I remember hearing a comedian on a podcast talk about Narnia and how she was so oblivious to the Christian messaging of the books that Lewis could have had Aslan actually nailed to a cross and she still wouldn’t have gotten it.
oblivious to the Christian messaging That was me. Brought up with no religion whatsoever, so none of it meant too much. I vaguely knew Aslan was Jesus – but was more vague on who Jesus was.To Lewis’ credit, he did not push that agenda to children, even when they wrote to him to ask about it. Closest he would come would be something like “you will probably find out who Aslan is meant to be as you get older.” Lewis was a grownup when he converted, and he converted after years of study and thought about various beliefs. He wanted, I imagine, people to embrace Christianity (or the religion of their choice) on their own terms, and didn’t try to convert anyone else. You know. Like a real Christian.
Y’know, growing up Christian, it was obvious what the Christian themes
were… But while many critics like to claim they’re “direct allegory,”
they’re not.
Despite being raised the same, I didn’t spot them until it was pointed out by my English teacher in secondary school (high school for my American cousins).
I just thought it was sad that Aslan died and then great when he came back.
I dunno maybe 11 year old me could have spotted what 7 year old me couldn’t, if I’d read it later in life?
I just thought it was sad that Aslan died and then great when he came back. Me too. But years later, when I read Tolkien, and Gandalf died and then came back, I thought it was hokum.
Anyway I’ve been surprised how many people I’ve met, co-workers or acquaintances, who didn’t know they were about God until it was pointed out.I was one of those people. I consumed an absolute mountain of fantasy books when I was a kid, so I just took it in the same vein as all the other magic wizard-savior stuff. At the time, it would’ve been like saying Gandalf was a Jesus figure because he dies and comes back. I would’ve been all, “that’s just what happens in these books.”
But yeah, when it was pointed out later on, the Christian influence is really clear.
There are moments where the books probably get really confusing if you don’t realize that Aslan is taking the form of human Jesus.
Aslan’s sacrifice and resurrection is pretty obvious, but how much other popular media has featured Christ figures? It’s not like Lewis invented it.I haven’t read the books in a while, but I’m trying to figure out what the allegories are in Prince Caspian.
honestly, i’d have to look it up. caspian doesn’t feel very allegorical. love the comment about “not like Lewis invented it”. Hardly the first and not even close to the last to have christ imagery in his myth and fiction!
Prince Caspian pins a massive guilt trip on the kids for losing faith and wandering out of Narnia, causing death and suffering for others.
The allegorical aspects were hardly unknown beforehand, but I think the post-Passion of the Christ marketing for the first Narnia film, and the controversy of The Golden Compass bringing an anti-Narnia to the screen popularised the idea of Narnia as a specifically “Christian thing”. Although the Bill Melendez film was co-produced by Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation.
Shit, I forgot about that cinematic context. blech.I feel like a lot of the NARNIA IS THE BIBLE stuff has come more after-the-fact, and in particular, as a result of Evangelicals. Which is funny because a lot of Lewis’ theology, particularly his later-life stuff, would not sit right at all. Even Mere Christianity is more profound and compassionate than anything we’ve seen…
“The allegorical aspects were hardly unknown beforehand, but I think the post-Passion of the Christ marketing for the first Narnia film, and the controversy of The Golden Compass bringing an anti-Narnia to the screen popularised the idea of Narnia as a specifically “Christian thing”. Although the Bill Melendez film was co-produced by Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation.”I don’t think so. Narnia was known to be a “Christian thing” when I was a kid in the ‘80s. If I’m not mistaken, The Golden Compass was written specifically to be anti-Narnia by the author.
Quite possibly, that’s just when I remember it becoming high profile. Pullman’s novels were certainly anti-Narnia, but that got a lot of attention (along with the general critique of religion) on an international scale when the film came out.
I only found out about the God thing from the Internet. As a kid, I just though Aslan was a nerd lion version of Gandalf.
Funny thing is, I never read the Narnia books — instead, I read Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength). The first two were readable, the last was…I don’t know what Lewis thought he was doing, but it was a royal mess to me!
I like Planet. I feel like I had a transcendent experience the first time I read perlandra. The third is… Yeah….
The first book is clearly patterned on the Christian model of some otherwise pretty universal themes, so it works. I’ve known people who read/watched and enjoyed TLTWATW without even spotting the allegory (although I’m always amazed that it’s even possible to do that).The latter books turn into straight-up 11th century Crusades propaganda. The Last Battle might as well have been ghost written by Urban II.
I’ve never heard of Henry Screamer.I think I only saw the first Potter film, having already given up on the books by then, and this seems to be one of the biggest gaps between me & my generation (the MCU arguably belongs to Zoomers).That issue with only the first book being all that well known applies to a number of other entries in that list of failed YA franchises, like Ender’s Game and Indian in the Cupboard.
Oh man, I remember those Indian In The Cupboard books getting weird. In one of them the boy figures out how to reverse the magic and sends himself back to the Old West, where he’s figurine-sized.
“Henry Screamer” was the fake Harry Potter from the kids cartoon Arthur. You might be too old. Mind you so was I.
I just assumed it was a porn star.
Agreed. It was much more of a LOTR thing than a Potter thing. Its not the same kind of series as Tolkien, or Potter, or any. You’re right. It’s wonderful as books albeit super hit or miss, but weird to film.
Tilda Swinton was outstanding, of course, and the other movies really missed her as the big bad.
On two occasions – when they first were coming out and again, recently, with my own kids – I tried to get through the Harry Potter movies. On both occasions, I made it to the fourth one and just cannot be bothered to finish them. They’re all long, and very similar, and just “okay” – not enough for me to want another 10 or 12 hours of it. As I never read the books, I had nothing invested in it and just couldn’t be arsed to finish the series, even though I gather they get better toward the end. The Narnia movies, on the other hand, I think are underrated. I also just re-watched these and they all hold up, despite some fairly clunky CGI. They do suffer from the first one being the best, though. The finale of Voyage of the Dawn Treader was amazing however.
I think Prince Caspian is a little too dour and violent and misses the mark somewhat, but I do have a soft spot for them as a whole. I didn’t see the when they were current as I assumed they wouldn’t be my scene, but caught some of Dawn Treader on TV a few years after it came out and found myself genuinely charmed (admittedly the film as a whole turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag).
Agreed, I didn’t love Prince Caspian but Dawn Treader was great. That annoying brat who turns into the dragon was the best casting ever… I wanted to punch him in the face the whole time. Saw him recently in Midsommar.
I agree with you on Narnia being a LOTR cash-in. Honestly, I felt the same way about Golden Compass and Eragon, if only because Golden Compass was like “sure New Zealand’s cool but what about a movie full of Austrailians???” and Eragon sounded like Aragorn to me.Twilight absolutely owes its cinematic existence to Harry Potter tho. I’d say Hunger Games does too.
And once again, as people go on about who “ripped off” that Transphobic Garbage Fire J.K. Rowling, I feel the need to remind everyone that Rowling herself ripped off Diana Wynne Jones’s WORLDS OF CHRESTOMANCI (https://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Chrestomanci-Diana-Wynne-Jones/dp/B000MAM9OS), the first four books of which were published anywhere from twenty years to nine years before Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone.
There are bits of Chrestomanci which feel like direct parodies of Harry Potter, despite the pesky being-published-first issue. Pretty much all of Witch Week, with its crappy private school in a world where witches are killed on discovery, plus the bit in Charmed Life where one of the characters doesn’t take it at all well that students of magic still have to do a regular school curriculum as well.
Another book by Diana Wynne Jones might clarify matters there — The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (https://www.amazon.com/Tough-Guide-Fantasyland-Essential-Fantasy/dp/0142407224), a hilarious and sharply satiric “guide book” that skewered fantasy clichés mercilessly.
ten times ten times more famous, tbhAlso at least that much better than the others. The Magician’s Nephew has an interesting kernel there, as the origin story of Narnia, but it suffers from the common prequel affliction of not holding up well apart from knowledge of the later world/earlier books.
To be fair, The Dark is Rising missed the tone of the novels so much that it barely qualified as an adaptation.
The movie manages to fuck up ARMORED FUCKING POLAR BEARS. Massively disappointing.
I think you’re thinking of The Golden Compass, unless the Dark Is Rising movie REALLY took some liberties with the source material.
Hahahahahaha! I could’ve sworn that read Golden Compass, but as many horrible liberties the Dark Is Rising took with its source (making Will American! ARRRRRRRRRRGH) it did not commit any crimes related to ARMORED FUCKING POLAR BEARS.
Oh damn it, this is the post I should have commented on. I’m so late to this conversation that no one’s ever going to see my griping about lumping Cooper’s mid-century books in with the post-Harry Potter YA fantasy glut.
I promise, I will make a point to go looking for your griping. So that we may gripe together, some more. 😉
The Seeker is an “adaptation” in the same way that Simon Birch “adapted” A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’m surprised Cooper didn’t pull a John Irving and demand they either change the characters’ names or not release it at all.
Hi, yes, I’m STILL angry at how badly they did TDIR. (That book in particular means a lot to me.)
Although, the way the industry operates these days, I wonder if we’ll ever get a good adaptation of it in mini-series form? (I think you could do it in just 4-6 episodes, if that.) I used to fear that we’d never get another try at it, but maybe that’s changed.The problem of course is that TDIR is not — as a book, I mean — regarded as the same kind of “blockbuster” as the 21st century YA novel series that get attention (and, like HDM, a second shot at life on TV after a poorly-received film attempt). TDIR is regarded as a classic, but I don’t think it’s very *famous*. It’s not Narnia. Anyway. Sigh. I’d love to see a really good adaptation of it someday, with all of its wonderfully pagan weirdness intact.
(The other problem with their making a — VERY BAD — TDIR movie in hopes it would become a franchise is that it’s the best book in the series. It’s kind of a Narnia situation, in which the main book is the one everyone knows, and the rest are diminishing returns. I say that as someone who loves the series! But I love TDIR itself more.)Am I remembering correctly that someone’s thinking of doing The Prydain Chronicles on TV soon? (Looked it up; no. Disney has the rights to the series and at last report, in 2016, wanted to do “a series of movies” about the book series… but there is no actual movement on that.
I finally watched the 8th movie for the first time a few months ago…and it was really bad, haha.Up there with HBP in terms of rushing past everything interesting and clever and sad about the original book, in favor of empty spectacle (with CGI that has NOT aged well).Goblet is very firmly the best movie.
Goblet’s definitely the one that I leave on if I happen to catch it playing on tv. I think it just lends itself well to being a movie with the series of challenges, but they also balanced the humor and drama best in that one I think.
For my money, they only truly nailed the adaption in one scene, after the first movie:Amos Diggery keening over Cedric’s body.
That was definitely a good choice to include; obviously it would have been hard to include all the emotional moments because of time, but I think the movies suffered without a lot of them, Neville’s parents especially.
Daniel Day Lewis’s “I abandoned my child!” bit from There Will Be Blood reminds me of that scene.
Oh God. I think I’ve only seen that scene in its entirety just once. I can’t bear to watch it. If it comes up, I always mute it and turn away. That’s man’s raw agony is too difficult to watch.
Goblet is the one I see the most because it’s always the one playing mid-day or early evening when I flip past USA/SyFy on a weekend.
I love Goblet for how much it utilizes the twins. The graveyard stuff was well done too. The Gaunt family plot was missed in HBP
Goblet is not my favourite, but you can definitely tell it’s the one that’s made by someone who went to a boarding school.
There actually WAS a successor to the Harry Potter film franchise: it was Game of Thrones, which offered a darker, more adult fantasy novel adaptation to the same kids who had grown up on Potter and who were now 20something adults.See, what all the studios crapping out half-hearted adaptions of Maze Runner and Eragon and the like didn’t seem to get was that these stories are much better suited to the serialized TV format (consider the huge amount of book content cut from the later Potter movies just to make them fit a movie runtime.) It’s just that the prestige TV era hadn’t begun when the first Potter movie hit. But the final Potter movie came along right around the dawn of streaming TV and prestige cable dramas, and studios were slow to realize that those were the mediums from which the next Harry Potter-type franchise would spawn.Hell, a lot of those failed attempts at YA novel movie adaptions are TV shows now. Does anyone remember the Series of Unfortunate Events movie, with Jim Carrey? Even if you do, I bet you have much fonder memories of the Netflix show, which unlike the film was enough of a success that it was able to adapt the whole book series. The Percy Jackson novels got two horrible movie adaptions, which Disney is ignoring in favor of a rebooted TV series on Disney Plus. HBO gave His Dark Materials the proper adaption fans had been awaiting for decades. And years of failed attempts to turn the Shadow and Bone novels into movies eventually resulted in them becoming a Netflix show instead, which quickly skyrocketed to the top of their viewership rankings.
There won’t ever be another film series like Harry Potter. But there will be plenty of TV shows.
I haven’t watched the ASOUE show yet, but I do enjoy the movie. They nailed the look and feel of the world, much of the casting is solid (at least amongst the adult cast) and the soundtrack is utterly brilliant. I want “The Letter That Never Came” to play at my funeral. That said, squashing the first three books into one movie was kind of a weird choice, and since it never got any sequels most of its mysteries went unresolved. Plus, I suspect Count Olaf’s gender-ambiguous henchman might be seen as a bit problematic nowadays.
The show takes the visual style of that movie and follows the books a lot better. The supporting characters are also better.
If you like the books, you should enjoy the show. And they do some entertaining and self-aware stuff with that particular supporting character.
IMO the Netflix ASOUE is one of the best book-to-screen adaptations. The aesthetic and the music and production is just about perfect, all the actors give it their all, they don’t really miss…. well, pretty much anything! from the books.
The androgynous henchperson gets a pretty good revamp in the TV show. The big issue with the character was that, in the books, it’s specifically said that they terrify the children because “they couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.” (using “it” for their pronoun sure didn’t help.)
In the TV show the henchperson still scares the children, but now it’s because they’re really big, never speak, and always have a look on their face like they’re about to snap and kill someone. The androgyny is still there, but it’s no longer a joke, it’s just an aesthetic detail that’s never really mentioned.
There actually WAS a successor to the Harry Potter film franchise: it was Game of Thrones, which offered a darker, more adult fantasy novel adaptation to the same kids who had grown up on Potter and who were now 20something adults.Both of those adaptations kicked off with the book series unfinished, but whereas Rowling was never in real danger of being lapped, GRRM notoriously failed to produce a single new book over the course of the series, which undoubtedly contributed to GOT’s poorly-received conclusion.
It seems like Hollywood learned from that, too; these days they seem much more eager to adapt book series that are completed.
Easily one of my favorite things to come out of GoT’s success is that the industry has moved away from adapting books into film and more toward television, which is much better suited for it.I can’t wait for The Wheel of Time tv series, and I’m dying for someone to adapt Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy.
Omg the mistborn trilogy could be phenomenal. Also down for Wheel of Time, as long as the show follows the pace of books 1-3 and the Sanderson books.
Otherwise we’ll get an entire season of Nynaeve (sp?) tugging on her braid in a cobalt dress emblazoned with cream slashes, sleeves bedecked with dew from the pitcher of chilled wine …..
I love Wheel of Time, but whooo the pace really took a beating once Rand came back from the desert.
Yeah, if there’s ever an adaptation that needs to be cutting a lot of chaff, it’s Wheel of Time.
[A female character SNIFFS and thinks about her NECKLINE.]http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/jordan.fires.shtml
Seeing Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol in the cinema was an epic experience. The Burj sequence particularly was one of the most thrilling bits and I remember it really fondly even now.2011 is full of fantastic movies – Fast Five, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and of course, my beloved Drive.
The Burj Kalifa scene is one of the few times I remember literally being on the edge of my seat.
I went in expecting Drive to be more like F&F (yes, I am that guy) and was a bit disappointed, but also oddly curious to read the book it was based on – which I ended up thoroughly enjoying. So win there, plus the style of Drive is so good.
It’s not necessarily my favourite action franchise, but props to Mission: Impossible for being one of the few that keeps getting better (as opposed to Fast & Furious which keeps getting…more).It’s not exactly a complete upwards trend but how many franchise are there where films 4-6 are far superior to films 1-3?
Honestly my answer to that question is the Fast & Furious movies (though I will still go to the floor for Tokyo Drift)
I thought someone might say that. I must say I don’t get these films. Tom rarely steers me wrong when it comes to action films but I don’t understand his love for this series at all. To each there own obviously, I’m glad people enjoy them.
You have a lot to learn about family. *sips Corona*
I watched Tokyo Drift a month or so ago, and had to pause it for five minutes to laugh after Takashi genuinely said to someone (I think his girlfriend) “We’re not so different, you and I.”It was dumb. Unbelievably, incredibly, gloriously, beautifully dumb. It was kind of wonderful.
The Honest Trailer for (I think) Hobbs & Shaw pointed out that Jason Statham said “You & me, we come from different worlds” which is literally a Hottie & the Blowfish line.
Hootie, though many thought he was a hottie.
Darius Rucker is fine as hell, but yes, damn autocorrect.
I think the first Mission Impossible movie is a virtually perfect throwback espionage film, which makes it kind of a completely different thing than the rest of the series.I don’t think it makes it better or worse, just different.
I can’t stomach the first MI because of the way it shits all over the original.
I like De Palma’s original MI for not being a James Bond villain. The villain isn’t trying to blow up the world, but instead just make money by screwing over their country’s covert agents. Films 4-6 are imitation Bond. WHY would anyone be helping these villains try to blow up the world?
It depends on what you consider 1-3 and 4-6 for Star Wars films 😀
Good point, well made!I think for the purposes of ‘getting better’ we should take the order in which they were made, but it would be churlish of me to deny your answer.
dude it is so crazy to me that i saw the first mission: impossible in the theatres when i was a literal child and now i’m pushing 40 and still excited for the next one.
How many franchises where 6 films using mostly the same cast even exist? I think it’s pretty common in TV to have seasons 4-6 be better than 1-3 and assume that’s likely because the writers have time to develop the characters based on what they think is working, so maybe the same applies to movies?
Ghost Protocol is my favorite of the MI films but I still think Rogue Nation and Fallout are excellent so I agree with your hypothesis.
On the Road to… Movies made from 1940 until 1962 with the same leads and pretty much the same story. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour Were in the first 6 and different women starred in the later films.
I’ve always been of the opinion that, while Tom Cruise has certainly been in some objectively bad movies, he hasn’t been in very many unwatchable movies.
The dude holds the screen. Like, Cocktail is a generally lousy movie, and I’m still sucked in for two hours because somehow Tom Cruise gets me to *care* about this asshole.
Cocktail is a film that makes a minimum wage profession spent serving sloppy drunks look like the easy path to becoming a combo rock star and business dynamo. You can either see that as insulting Hollywood bullshit or charming Hollywood nonsense. I choose the latter.
In regard to the minimum wage comment. If you work at a busy place, you make way more than minimum wage in tips alone and you probably make more than minimum wage to start.
It was kind of a deliberate over-simplification, but thank you for the additional context.
I’d say The Mummy (2017) is pretty close to unwatchable and while it has its defenders I’d say Legend is also no good. Probably noteworthy that Cruise is completely miscast in both of those.
I have a soft spot for Legend. It’s so pretty. Mostly.
I think what’s interesting about Mission Impossible is that until recently they kept on changing directors so each movie was different. I love them I do.
It’s funny, the first MI bored the hell out of me, and I have zero interest in watching 2 or 3. 4-6, however, are so perfectly ludicrous I can’t help but smile watching them. For me, it’s the scene in Rogue Nation when Tom Cruise has to hold his breath for several minutes. He has a wrist band that tells him exactly how much oxygen is in his blood like it’s a video game. I knew exactly what was going to happen in that scene down to the second, and rather than rolling my eyes, I was giddy with anticipation.
I love how it’s evolved into a vehicle to let Cruise do crazier and crazier stunts. You’ve gotta wonder why he does it. Does he feel *that* dead inside that he needs the rush?
It’s a good question. I’m a fan of both franchises, but the movies I favor in each series vary wildly from popular opinion. Mainly because I still really like the original entries in both. I’ll take first Mission Impossible over Rogue Nation, and I’ll take Fast and Furious 1 over 4, 6-8 any day.
I appreciate Mission: Impossible, but holy shit does Simon Pegg just take me straight out of the movie whenever he’s on screen. He’s just one of those British comedians who I cannot for the life of me get over seeing in serious roles.I wonder if the British feel the same way about Robin Williams.
I wonder if the British feel the same way about Robin Williams.—Speaking as a Brit who grew up watching Mork & Mindy, no I don’t. I think Dead Poets Society was the first “serious role” I saw Robin Williams in and he totally convinced me in that. Despite being the wacky funny man from stand up specials I was too young to be watching in 80’s, when RW played it straight it didn’t feel odd.
Honestly, I’m British and I kind of feel that way about Pegg. Dude’s a funny comedian and his “Cornetto” films are nerd-charming, but the fact that he somehow became a major star will never not be baffling to me. (I’m also kind of like that with Hugh Laurie, because I will never not see him as Prince George from Blackadder and seeing him growling Americanly like a serious person in House is just utterly dissonant. I’ve never been able to get into that show for largely that reason.)
I guess you could make an argument that Star Trek IV – VI average out better than I – III. Though as one set has the greatest film as its centre and the other has the worst, it might just break even.
I was re-reading Handlen’s Trek reviews and someone made the point that III is basically on a par with IV, but gets retroactively ranked down in order to fit the “even numbered Trek” thing. Personally, I’d much prefer to suffer through that two hour Enterprise approach in I, then get II and III, than I would to be mostly amused by IV, suffer through V, then spend VI thinking about Generations.
The Search For Spock is heads and shoulders the best of the odd numbered Trek films. Its even better than “Tom Hardy doesn’t look anything like Patrick Stewart” Nemesis.
Ah, but Nemesis is even numbered, and arguably Exhibit #1 of why the odd/even thing is total nonsense (#2 is that Beyond is an odd number). The other odd numbered TNG film is Insurrection, which is probably underrated (at least insofar as it isn’t Generations or Nemesis).
The only way to make the rule still work is to include Galaxy Quest in the mix and thus Nemesis becomes Star Trek XI. This then makes JJ Abrams Star Trek in turn XII, though things fall apart for Into Darkness and Beyond (pun intended).
You (and Handlen) might be right about III. It’s been a long time since I saw it (even though I always intend to after I watch Khan).
idk the most I’ve enjoyed a Mission Impossible movie was Ghost Protocol. I’m glad they pivoted to more classic espionage after, but like with Fallout, I felt precisely no tension at the end; it was practically written in stone by that point that the good guys had to win. It was set up as this huge reckoning, that just kind of fell flat for me, cuz I knew there would be sequels. Also there were these really shocking real-world-echoing espionage operations, that had these really interesting morally grey situations, that Tom Cruise inevitably Tom Cruises his way out of. He never has to make a meaningful choice when he can Mission Impossible his way out of morally impossible situations.Also that bit at the end with his wife was nice but also super weird if you look at it like she’s speaking to Cruise himself. “Go, save the world, I know it’s what you do best.” It’s like Cruise is getting an apology from all the women in his life, lol it’s super weird.
the first harry potter was probably just out on dvd and playing while i made out with a girl for the first time, that and a nicole kidman movie about a haunted house. i like those movies but not because i actually watched them. alls i remember is the dude that looked like trent reznor.
One detail that I think gets glossed over a lot when talking about the Harry Potter film series is how incredibly fortunate the producers where with their child actor casting for the first film. Not just the main three, of course, but the supporting players as well: Tom Felton evolving from preteen bully to wimpy villain wannabe, Oliver and James Phelps as chaotic pranksters thumbing their noses at tyrants, Matthew Lewis going from punchline to hero, even Harry Melling as dull Dudley. Only Bonnie Wright as Ginny faltered in the later movies, though that could well be because she had so little to work with as her character matured. All told, it’s quite a remarkable young cast.
You know, it’s interesting that a boy wizard is probably one of the tamest roles Radcliffe has done in his career. From wizard to (off the top of my head, and just the ones that stick out the most) a morphine-addicted young doctor, Alan Strang, whatever the fuck Horns was about, a guy with guns nailed to his hands, and of course, a farting corpse with a boner. Yep, boy wizard sure seems normal in comparison.
I’m glad that he made enough money from the HP series that he can spend the rest of his career taking on goofy and fun film/tv roles without having to go back to a major franchise film to make a living.
Agreed, but that said, he should still be Wolverine when the MCU rolls around to that.
My picks for Wolverine would be either Karl Urban or Richard Armitage (Armitage has even voiced Wolverine for a recent podcast).
Don’t forget reader of the year’s worst tweets. Darrel Rovell with a plummy accent is somehow even worse.
Don’t forget surprisingly talented amateur rapper (of other people’s verses)!
He’s also been absolutely stellar in his comedic roles. He’s a hilarious scene-stealer in Kimmy Schmidt and Miracle Workers – and given in the latter he’s alongside Steve Buscemi is truly impressive.
And that is nothing compared to his Broadway choices. If you only saw the Tony’s performance of him in “How to Succeed…” it did not quite capture how good he got in the song and dance role later in the run (I had a bunch of summer research college students who were exactly Harry Potter fandom age and it was the clear pick for the Broadway show that year).
Before that…Equus. (If you don’t know Equus, the play has both leads naked on stage).
These were not ‘safe’ theater choices. The West End adults clearly rubbed off on Radcliffe. His shows also set all kinds of fundraising records for Broadway Cares during their annual drives in the theaters, so he did the mutual goods of increasing philanthropy and getting young audiences excited for live theater.
(As a side note on Harry Potter and theater, the play you really want to see is Puffs! – it covers Hufflepuff during “7 increasingly eventful years” and just has some really fun use of stage craft – including Ron and Hermione being two mops carried around by the Potter extra).
I do know Equus (Alan Strang is the troubled youth). A very bold choice, and I’m glad he had the courage to do it.I love hearing about hos theater exploits. I’ll have to see if I can hunt down clips.I thought it was very sweet that Alan Rickman made a point to see Radcliffe’s shows. Rickman sounded lile an awesome person to work with. He is definitely missed in the world of entertainment.
I saw him in Equus! He was terrific.
His best role is still playing himself on Bojack Horseman, and I will broach no argument on the topic!
I wanna say….Elijah Wood?
“When you are as famous as I am, you just meet so many people…….”
Imperium has a great Daniel Radcliffe role. He plays a guy going undercover in a neo Nazi group. Loved it and I wish it was really popular and well known.
I would have loved to have seen “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying” on Broadway with Radcliffe and John Larroquette. All the clips I saw looked fantastic.
It’s almost as if he’s consciously taking divergent roles to avoid typecasting…
Oh, I understand that, my sarcastic friend, and it’s understandable that as the Harry Potter himself, he’d want to take leaps and bounds compared to his other young castmates. And some of his leaps and bounds have sent him soaring past typecasting at ludicrous speed. I love it.
Those are still secondary to what I think is his greatest role: “A young actor messing with the NYC papparazzi while doing ‘Equus’ on Broadway by wearing the exact same outfit when he left the theater, making the photos worthless.”
The heroes of the franchise were the casting people who not just got the Trio right but also every side character and famous British actor right. Sure, Alan Rickman as Snape is a no brainer but all the other roles played by big name actors were perfect
Sure, Alan Rickman as Snape is a no brainer but all the other roles played by big name actors were perfect
The funny thing is it could have been Tim Roth as Snape, but chose Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes instead. The punchline here should be that he made a terrible mistake, but he was by far and away the best thing in that film. Despite that ending not making any sense, I’d have liked to have seen Roth in some sort of sequel.
I think Tarantino ruined Roth for movies like this as all you can think of when you see him is how scared he was by someone with a bad Jheri curl and love for big kahuna burgers
Counter point: Gridlock’d with Tupac is very good. Also it’s the kind of buddy movie sorely missed in present day Hollywood.
God, I almost forgot how good he was in that movie.
What did Alan Rickman sound like when he was ten?
Eh, I’d argue that Snape and his contemporaries were all cast 10-15 years older than they should have been. It takes away from the grim reality that most of them were college-aged the first time they fought Voldemort, that Harry’s parents were struck down so young and it makes it even creepier that they all misplace their affection/disgust for James to Harry. Snape and the Marauders should have been in their late 30s. Instead you got Rickman in his 50s and late 40’s/early 50s Oldman, Thewlis and Spall.
I just assumed that we were operating in Hollywood years – all men are playing characters 10-15 years their junior, but because they are all British no one has a skin care regime to pull that off.
I wondered why Warwick Davis was in that bizarre awful makeup for the first 2 films.
I picture Warwick Davis these days sitting at the bar drinking shots and muttering “Fucking Peter Dinklage” every time he slams his shot glass on the table.
Well he is a dirty peck.
Rickman wasn’t even the first choice. He was cast after Tim Roth turned it down to do Planet of the Apes.
It’s really true. Nails why I have such a soft spot for the eighth movie. It throws in a gratuitous flashback to the first one, just so you can see how very young they were when it all started, but it wasn’t even necessary, you could feel the weight of what a large percentage of the child cast’s lives had been spent making these movies. I found it far more moving than it should have been, just on that basis. And it was so satisfying seeing Harry lose his fear of Voldemort, and Neville become a hero.
It’s really a miracle that throughout 8 films every single character continued to be played by the original actor with the exception of Dumbledore, and that was because Richard Harris died, so he had an excuse.
Even just looking at the core three, the one that you really, really, need to get right is Harry and him turning out to be the best actor of the bunch is just really fortunate for the franchise. The later movies would have been a lot worse if they had to work around a terrible actor in the lead.Rupert Grint seems to largely play himself in the Potter movies, which is fine since he’s a good enough actor to convincingly play himself on screen. His post-Potter work has been fine but not outstanding – certainly not on the level of Radcliffe’s. Emma Watson is not a great actor – she’s super wooden and can’t convincingly convey emotion. She’s landed a few fairly large roles post-Potter and hasn’t been that impressive in any of them and now appears to be taking a break from acting.
Sure, the kids who were part of the series from the start were good-to-great, and the adults were a cast of ringers, but for my money, no actor portrayed a character more perfect than Evanna Lynch did as Luna Lovegood.
I have seriously mixed feelings about the big Harry vs. Voldemort showdown. On the plus side, they moved the giant ‘why Harry owns the Elder Wand’ exposition dump to after the fight. On the other hand, they turned what was, in the book, essentially a quick-draw, Old West showdown into an overblown spectacle with Harry & Riddle flying all over the castle & dueling several times.
HERE ARE CLOSE-UPS OF THEIR FACES WITH WHIRLING SCENERY BEHIND THEM AAAHHHHHHHH
I’ll admit it looks really cool when the wands are throwing a Dragonball-style kamehameha at each other and raw magic splashes off like paint.
The final two HP movies did a good job of taking a darker tone while keeping the characters intact. You could argue that the previous movies we’re basically unnecessary to the overall plot, but that’s an issue the books also had. Even if the ending is pretty generic, it’s a good way to end what became an absolutely massive franchise. The movies after it sucked.
The Narnia books just suck so the movies stood little chance.
I’ve watched through these movies twice and I still have no idea what Voldemort and his minions wanted.
Did the movies not make it clear that he was basically wizard Hitler? The books make it obvious it was all about racial purity — and is also why Rowling’s heel-turn as a TERF is so fucking ironic.
I think the issue isn’t that Voldemort’s goal is hard to see, it’s that it’s so boring.
It’s a lot like Sauron — if he won, then what? There are villains who you can imagine having a blast with cocaine and parties if their plan for world domination worked, but Voldemort seems like he’d just brood and drink chalky liquids to sooth his ulcers.
After purging muggle-borns from the wizard community, I figure he’d then just get his kicks torturing muggles randomly.
If they had designs on anything beyond the secret magic world that would affect anything on Planet Muggle, I missed it.
I think he said something in one of the books about how the wizard community should rule the world, not hide from it.I dunno, maybe I’m confusing him with Deacon Frost from Blade.
No no, I think you’re thinking of Magneto.
Voldemort wanted to summon the Blood God La Magra.
One of the biggest advantages this movie had was a good ending to the books, something very rare (although this is more of a problem with science fiction than fantasy). Note, I would have made this comment even before Game of Thrones.
I’ll scream this into the void until I die, but game of thrones had a great ending marred by bad storytelling. There could be no winner through warfare. Tyrion was so, so wrong, something we never expected of him. The White Walkers targeted Bran because he was on the verge of uniting and strengthening humanity, since he’s an immortal who will never have the succession issue that started the story. Jon realized that the generations of fighting and death were just so he could be born, and he walked away from it. Those are all very good plot points that never rose above subtext.
Wait, Bran is immortal?
Presumably, since the previous three eyed raven was a thousand years old or something.
I don’t remember if he was a thousand years old on the show. In the books he’s only like ~130 years old, and only still alive because he’s in the process of becoming a tree. Something that Bran avoids in the show.
*shrug* I enjoyed pt1 and found pt2 either obnoxious or dull. I will always argue for films being *adaptations* of books, not literal retellings. The Lestrange vs Molly Weasley “battle” is both a pale, limp shadow of their duel in the novel, and absurdly comic and weightless in the take it does go with. Also the Voldemort vs Harry final duel is awful.
I like the first one too as the 2nd was mainly one, long battle that was heavy on fan service. I like the tension and air of menace in the first one. It’s the only one, I think, that you actually feel there’s real stakes to it. I also like the camping sequence, damnit. Slowing things down and letting the characters breath is always good
Yep! I enjoyed it all so much, and I was dreadfully bored or annoyed by most of the action in part2, or the way they chose to frame various setpieces.Neville tho. =D
I think it’s the one Yates wanted to do the most, coming from his background of political thrillers, he brought a lot to the way the political institutions had been corrupted and outright taken.
You know what I’ve never gotten. Why is the curse that kills someone forbidden but the curse that Molly uses in the movies which seems to explode Bellatrix into shreds OK?Or was it just the killing curse but it was OK cause she’s a good guy defending her daughter?
The answer is: it was stupid and lazy, and a horrible “fight” and scene. Bellateix: hisssss Molly: not my daughter you bitch Zap Zap zap Desdo Again, i loathe getting into the weeds of BUT THE BOOK DID IT BETTER…..THE BOOK DID IT BETTER
That’s litteraly Rowling’s explanation, that becuase the act came from her mother’s love of her daughter it could not be completely bad. But that’s also kinda weird becuase we’ve always been told that the spell itself is inherently bad, and that good wizards simply don’t use it. Sure, they fight and at times kill, but they use other spells. To me, that seems to further imply that the spell itself is inherently evil.
I’m surprised JK didn’t move the franchise to a smaller studio Left Behind style so she could make new films like Harry Potter and the Bathroom Invaders or Harry Potter and the Dreadful Immigrants. Thank the studio for keeping their iron grip, I guess.
I truly enjoyed Deathly Hallows, Parts 1 and 2. Each of them had really enjoyable scenes that I think are underrated; although as a book reader I do not like the way the final Harry-Voldemort duel went down (it should’ve been quick), or how Voldemort died (he was supposed to be a corpse, revealing him to be just a man). Still, a great end to the franchise.
I don’t care for part 2, but the first part is one of the better movies in the series.
I half-interestedly read the first two books on a long car trip to Oregon one time, so I don’t feel like I’m quite the authority on whether the resulting movies are any good or not. They’re held quite dearly by the fanbase, so I think they’re all successes – and I think it’s funny that Boyhood got so much press and praise for its filmmaking, when this saga gives you the same effect but with neat wizard battles too.That said, the Cuaron one was such an advance over the previous movies that it sort of made me wish they’d keep bringing in bold, unique filmmakers to expand the series’ palette more. Kinda like what M:I was supposed to be for auteurs until McQuarrie locked in the official house style (a less antic, more po-faced spin on Brad Bird’s set piece strings).
I feel like that’s what the MCU has been doing. It started with Before-We-Knew-He’s-a-Dick Joss Whedon and The Avengers, followed by Shane Black, James Gunn, Taika Waititi, and Ryan Coogler. Plus, we have upcoming films directed by Sam Raimi and Chloe Zhao. Really, the only missed opportunity was not letting us see Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man (though Petyon Reed did a fine enough job).
i would say the mcu directors bow to the house style rather than the other way around. even taika said he pretty much had nothing to do with the action sequences in thor 3
The MCU’s action sequences, specifically, tend to be handled by the second unit. That’s where most of the “house style” comes from.
Yeah, and it’s telling that after Cuaron they brought in a journeyman like Newell, and then stuck with a tv-guy.
The films were probably on too much of a ticking clock to ever be allowed any real creative risk (in so far as that’s possible on those budgets), they had to reliably crank them all out before the kids got too old.
I hated the last film. The biggest reason was that the last confrontation with Voldemort. It’s fucking stupid and it’s fucking laughable, not in good ways.Regardless of the quality of the books, Harry taking out Voldemort is a great scene as written. There’s no giant punch-up, lasers, kamehameha bullshit. Just a dude who knows he’s already won explaining it to the dude who still won’t get that he lost, all while surrounded by people who love him and used to fear the other. It’s more cathartic than the big fight because it underscores how pathetic and childish Voldemort always was, which contrasts Harry’s character development over the series nicely.
It’s poetic, it contains irony, and it underscores the themes Rowling hammered on throughout the entire series —- love wins over fear. Voldemort loses because in his arrogance he can’t possibly imagine that caring about people matters.
It’s a scene that reminds me of Doctor Who in the way the climax revolves around a conversation in which the hero is steps ahead of the villain and is willing to give him a chance.
The first Fantastic Beasts had some great casting in Colin Farrell (JUST KEEP HIM IN THE MOVIES YOU IDIOTS), Ezra Miller, and (fight me) Dan Fogler as the Ron-Weasley-If-A-Muggle stand-in. So I’d argue that one very specific point. But the two “leads” were sooooo boring and the film really doesn’t justify itself. And then that sequel. Fuck.
i think the general consensus is that dan fogler is the best part of those movies.and yeah, i’ve never seen a movie franchise where the movies can’t wait to get away from the lead character, and i’ve never seen a lead character’s performance be so awful.
Oh! Good. Okay. Everyone carry on then.
Indeed, nobody cared how silly the explanation was for Jacob being in the sequel, they were just happy he was there.It’s frankly astounding that Fogler is currently on The Walking Dead but is like the twenty seventh most important character when he is simultaneous the most popular character in a blockbuster franchise.i
Yep, people love Jacob Kowalski.
The biggest problem with the Fantastic Beasts movies is it doesn’t know who the protagonist is. The movie believes Newt’s the protagonist, and all the filmic language throughout signals him as the protagonist. Problem is, he’s not. He’s the Mysterious Stranger.See, Newt Scamander arrives in New York City with a box of secrets and he acts secretively, and we spent much of the first half of the movie not knowing anything about who he is or what he wants. We don’t know anything, really, until he brings Jacob down inside his case to his transportable menagerie. And that’s when we finally know why he’s in the United States (to release a creature in its native Arizona), and that his own goals involve the care and protection of magical creatures. He’s made a bit of a mess, which he cleans up, and then he helps clean up the larger mess that happens incidentally around him. The movie constantly keeps Newt at arms length from the audience. He doesn’t give us viewpoint, nor are we invited to sympathize with him.So, then, obviously, the protagonist is Jacob. He, after all, is a clear viewpoint character with a clearly defined goal. He wants to get out of the cannery job and start a bakery. He’s a no-maj, so through his eyes we see wonder and magic and experience everything new the story shows us. He has almost the classic Campbellian journey where he gets the call to something fantastic, to then return to the normal world changed.Except, he isn’t changed. He is forced to forget it all. And, on top of that, he doesn’t DO anything that requires active choice and affects the plot. His most active moment is punching a goblin, but that doesn’t have any impact on events– things would have proceeded more or less the same without that goblin being punched. He basically floats through the movie being awed, and ends with a reward, but he doesn’t affect the story.Who does make choices? Tina. Tina has all the markings of the protagonist– she’s got an arc of needing to redeem herself, she makes active choices, and she’s the one whose life the Mysterious Stranger impacts. But the movie doesn’t want her to be the protagonist– it wants her to be the (other) plucky sidekick to Newt, and thus consistently minimizes or sidelines her. It places her in the position to be rescued from the execution, it tries to establish her bond with Credence, but then does nothing with that in favor of having Newt connect to him.
I think that has to do with the fact that the Fantastic Beast movies were pitched as an “all-new story in the Wizarding World” and at some point in the production process got sloppily reconfigured into Harry Potter: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. So now there’s this framing device about Newt Scamander having adventures with magical animals that Rowling & Co. just absolutely do not care about.
Yep! My take on the first one was: “I don’t care about the plot, uggggggh really, Johnny Depp is Grindelwald (removed from any abuse stuff, i’m simply so borrrred of him), this and that is stupid, JACOB + QUEENIE FOREVERRRRRRRR”
Annnnd the second movie ruined that too 🙁
I feel bad for Katherine Waterston. She’s talented as hell but is stuck doing thankless work here (you can see she works with what she has, at least in the first one, but what she has is basically nothing).
I remember liking Katherine Waterston in the first movie but man she had nothing to do in the sequel. But jeez that sequel was legitimately the worst film I have ever seen in my entire life. Like the first one was alright, but holy shit
I agree. The first film wasn’t bad. It felt like two films fighting for space in one but it was reasonably entertaining. The second movie was just a catastrophe.
Mostly what stuck out to me was just how lazily imagined it was. The Harry Potter books weren’t breathtakingly original in terms of tone or worldbuilding, but she was at home in that world. The Fantastic Beasts films swap all of the detail from the books for just rendering a lot of concept art in cgi. They feel empty, not to mention the clunkiness of words like ‘nomaj’.
I actually like Part 1 more than Part 2; the former is obviously slower, but it has some of the best character work of the entire series.You’re right that this definitely prefigures the MCU approach to franchise filmmaking in a lot of ways.
100%
MI:Ghost Protocol was according to my Netflix history a film I watched 12 times in two years. Apparently it was good to see after work/the bar/etc.As for F&F? I stopped watching after the second one. Does nothing for me and bores me to death. The scene that Tom had in the article…and it’s not his fault, but damn did it bore the shit out of me. And it’s just plain dumb. Not saying it’s dumber than essentially all the MI movies, it’s just that the latter seem more plausible (and fun) to me than watching guys drive cars. ‘Cause NASCAR is fun.“Left. Left. Left. Go Left!!!”I also love nothing more than the chance to make fun of NASCAR fans. I lived in Charlotte, NC for two years and there was nothing worse than speed week. NASCAR fans literally are the worst.
The Fast/Furious movies are mostly bad, but Fast Five (the linked one) is genuinely good – it’s basically a goofy heist movie. The scene in the article is the climax so is probably somewhat boring out of context.
There’s actually remarkably little driving/racing these days in all the best Fast/Furious movies.
Ghost Protocol is one of those infinitely rewatchable movies. I like all of the movies but that one is my favorite personally.
That movie is the one I found myself putting on when I was finally getting home drunk as hell and thinking it’d be good to fall asleep to…and then I’d end up watching it to the end. I may have low standards, but Ghost Protocol is a perfect blend of humor and action for me.
I’ve never seen a fast & furious movie but as I understand it the second one is especially bad and they got “good” when Justin Lin came along.
The cutting-in-half of the last book works great for the first movie – it opens it up, lets it breathe, and allows time for the character moments that make the (movie) series work as well as it does. As a result it’s anything but a slog: it’s one of the best films in the franchise (I’ve got it at #2, right behind Goblet).On the other hand, it really hurts the second film, mainly because of that all-climax-by-necessity nature of it. It’s fine for what it is but for most of its runtime it feels like it’s just checking boxes. As a result it’s definitely in the bottom half of the series, and probably the worst post-Columbus movie.
It seems that you and I had different opinion regarding the two-parter Deathly Hallows. I thought Part 1 was perfectly made while Part 2 was a slog, especially with the final battles that went on too long. And once it finally ended, it felt anti-climatic comparing to fist-pumping bombastic crescendo that was in the book. Part 2 made few too many changes that broke away from what made the book such a great conclusion in which Part 1 nailed so well.The Harry Potter movies are no masterpiecesProbably so? I would debate that they’re masterpieces as adaptations in which few films actually meet or exceed their source materials. Potter films compliment so perfectly with the book series, it nigh difficult to separate the two formats from each other.I would argue that Prisoner of Azkaban, Order of the Phoenix, and Deathly Hallows Part 1 are the best of series for their faithful interpretation of plot and characters and twists from the book.
It seems that you and I had different opinion regarding the two-parter Deathly Hallows. I thought Part 1 was perfectly made while Part 2 was a slog, especially with the final battles that went on too long. And once it finally ended, it felt anti-climatic comparing to fist-pumping bombastic crescendo that was in the book. P THANK YOU! It’s interesting that you note Azkaban and Phoenix as “most faithful.” I think Azkaban is the best FILM in the series; Phoenix is the shortest movie out of the longest book. They make significant changes, leave lots out, and that is one reason some fans dislike them —- my one friend dislikes them because “they changed too much.” But I think you’re right that Azkaban and Phoenix maintain the most IMPORTANT plot elements, they do the characters very well, and they have the best twists.One way Phoenix, IMO, is better than book – besides not being bloated by 200 ages – is that epic swooping in of the Order, into the department of mysteries, to save the day. It is awe-inspiring in a fashion the book never gets across.
OotP is my favorite book and I loved the move. I thought it did a great job shedding all the excess weight and maintaining the core elements of the story.Then again, maybe it was just so traumatized by the first two films’ insistence on including every single detail from the books, that I was relieved to see someone finally make a proper adaptation (as opposed to slavish adherence to the text at the cost of the overall property).
my lit professor friends harps on this all the time! An adaptation is not a slavish recreation! “adaptation (as opposed to slavish adherence to the text at the cost of the overall property).”I’m interested to hear it’s your favorite movie; as the usual refrain is “they cut out soooo much.” I think you’re exactly right, it retained the core and important elements of the story.
We have Cuaron to thank for that. He steered the series into a far better vision that Newell and Yates were happy to roll with.As for OotP, it’s my least favorite of the books, but my favorite of the films. They did an amazing job cutting it down to the essentials.
Yeah, I never quite get the praise for Yates who simply took Cuaron’s visual style, but didn’t have any of the same wit and creativity.
Agreed that Azkaban is the best movie of the series because it gotten everything right about Harry Potter’s characters, plot, and universe. The only mark against it is not fleshing out the Marauders gang that created the map and that sort of take away interesting development of Harry’s parents later in the series.I have to admit that The Order of Phoenix is my personal favorite book because I felt it did great job exploring Harry’s grief and depression and rage as well as further expanding the mysteries and world-building. And Dolores Umbridge was incredibly written as someone to hate so much more than almost everyone else. The movie was my most anticipated and it also became my personal favorite film of series for nailing everything that made the book great.I understood why they made several changes from the book and I say they made all these right changes, including clarifying that Voldemort is indeed connected to Harry. The Department of Mysteries segment was nail-biting in book and that was thankfully trimmed down to more thrilling pace that climaxed with a devastating loss and the best wizard duel onscreen. Ralph Finnes really showed why he was perfectly casted as Voldemort here, much more so than during Goblet of Fire. I was literally on edge of seat during these parts.
As I recall, in the book Harry’s possession is over in a matter of sentences. And a lot of the catharsis came from the long conversation in Dumbledore’s office.I loved that the movie found its own path by making a big deal out of the possession, using it as the moment of emotional climax and catharsis for Harry, and giving us a kickass duel between Voldemort and Dumbledore (and then not trying to re-create almost anything from the office scene, which it probably would’ve failed at).
Imo, the later Harry Potter films have a lot of great examples like this one where leaning into the advantages of your form (book vs film) can really enhance the experience. Including the fact that the films can improve in some areas where the books have limitations (Snape’s memory montage in the eighth movie being one of my favorites.)
I could never forgive Part 2 for denying me Voldemort’s thoroughly mundane death from the book. I also made mistake of seeing the film in 3d, and let me tell you, a shower of Voldemort flakes is not something anyone should have to endure.
A thing that the movies kind of skipped over (and would have probably required a very different casting decision) is that Voldemort is physically a frail old man; who despite his magic prowess, the transformations and rebirth he went through, was a just a man. Having him die the way he did in the book reinforced that, whereas the movie version had him dissolving into dust like he didn’t have a body like you or me.
Hmm…seems like an odd group of movies to pick out. OotP notably omits a lot of the book as it has the shortest runtime of any of the movies while trying to adapt the longest book. I don’t dislike it but it’s far from the most faithful adaptation and there is a lot cut.I don’t really think any of the movies skip past any truly important story beats either. So I’m curious what your reasoning is for saying other movies are worse at adapting the stories.
Marvel certainly followed its lead—introducing screen adaptations of
beloved print characters, building them slowly over multiple movies,
bringing everything to the big climax that dominates all its theatrical
rivals.
These movies really suffer for being pre-Marvel. By continually bringing in new directors/Yates just not caring about long term plotting, I don’t know if the actual story makes sense in the movies.
I’ve often wondered — if you’ve never read the books, and didn’t have a friend filling in the blank spots, or wanted to google it after — if the movies make any fucking sense As Movies.
My husband nobly came with me to see the final movie and of course slept through the whole thing. By this point they didn’t bother to provide any sort of recap – if you were in the audience, you were supposed to know what was going on.
They do. I didn’t read the books until after I had already seen all the movies (multiple times), and had no problem following any of them. I think the movies, overall, are better.
Same. I read each book after the I saw the movie, and it functioned like an extended cut. More detail, more character work for, say, Neville. You could sort of see why plot elements were condensed or removed. The movies themselves were always perfectly easy to follow.
There are one or two awkward bits (a big one being that Cuaron never actually bothered to establish that James and co. were the Marauders in Prisoner of Azkaban, something all the subsequent movies treat as established canon), but mostly they do work on their own.
Cuaron also gives some of Harry’s dialogue to hermione, which was weird.
I’ve only watched the movies, never read the books, and they made enough sense to me.
After those underwhelming first two Chris Columbus moviesI must have missed those. The ones I saw that Chris Columbus did were amazing and he should have done the entire series. Maybe then we wouldn’t have had the utter shit-show that was the Goblet of Fire.
hahahhahahahahno
I also think Chris Columbus did a great job, and it has been frustrating to see people shit on him, when he’s responsible for so much of the onscreen iconography we now love about HP. But I also think Goblet of Fire is awesome, too…
Columbus was a good choice to start the series, when the characters (and the actors who portray them, AND the primary audience) were little kids. Moving on as the fans, actors, and characters grew probably helped a lot.I mean, the first movie is good, but the second one starts to draaaaag. If they kept Columbus, we’d still be watching Order of the Phoenix.
My favorite scene from GoF:
Dumbledore: HARRY! ::smashes vase:: DID YOU PUT YOUR FUCKING NAME IN THIS FUCKING GOBLET?
Harry: No I didn’t I swear!
Dumbledore: ::jacks Harry up against a wall:: YOU DID, YOU SQUIRRELLY PIECE OF SHIT.
Snape: Fuck’s sake Albus cut the kid some slack I think he’s telling the truth
Meanwhile, in the book:
Dumbledore: ::gently rocks Harry like a mother with a newborn:: Harry, I know you’re innocent, I will walk into traffic for you.
Second favorite scene:
15-minute CGI dragon rampage
Meanwhile, in the book:
Harry goes Accio Firebolt and has the egg in 2.3 seconds, faster that anyone else.
No seriously, the entire scene takes 1 1/2 pages in the book and the point is he does it quicker than anyone else. But no, gotta spend that CGI budget.
The Tri-Wizard Tournament was facing voter fraud. Dumbledore doesn’t mess around! lol
I liked his movies too – they felt really closely in-tune with the books.The other thing people underrate is Columbus did a really good job directing the kids in the movie.
I read the first book right after I saw the first movie, and I remember being wildly impressed that they nailed it almost 100%. A few lines here and there near the end, but for the most part, it is an almost perfect adaptation of a book. The aesthetic takes heavy direction from Mary GrandPré’s artwork, and the dialog is super close to the source.
PoA lost the entire aesthetic, and GoF just started wholesale character changes. OotP was good because the book is a jumbled mess, so in comparison the movie is better. And HBP is just a garbage movie character-wise, especially Harry. The changes are so unnecessarily stupid.
“The Potter kids all went on to varyingly successful post-Potter careers”Sadly, you can’t say the same for the characters they portrayed: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=09042007
Thought you were going to post this bit.
Part 1, but how did the Scabior/Hermione stuff make it into the final cut?
The HP movies went from “Just Okay” to “Actually really good”. There was only one of them I can think of that just fell apart (I think it was the 5th one – it just went from one set piece to another. Which was understandable since at that point it was trying to adapt a 600 page novel into a 2 hour movie and basically it was all relevant.) but even that one had some good stuff in it to make it “Meh, I can watch it in the background” material.
The Harry Potter franchise would have both benefited and suffered from finding an adaptation 10 years later when it could have been picked up by Netflix or something as a series that covered everything. (or a streaming service that produces more than one season of a show.) But this is tailor made for a deeper dive into the material that suffered from trying to fit it into a 2 hour runtime.That being said, the longer they would delay the longer they would have to worry about (gestures grandly at JK Rowling.)
If they wait until she dies, problem solved!wait
Creatively benefited, maybe, but commercially nothing beats the movies.
idk, given how influential the franchise was the genre landscape might have been very different had Harry Potter come later.
when the characters, in convincing middle-aged makeup,I forgot about that! I can’t believe they attempted that with a straight face! Having the kids play themselves as parents decades later in that epilogue is probably the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen a movie try to do. LOL!Yea, for whatever reason I didn’t care for the Deathly Hallows Pt 2. (The parts I could see- the cinematography was often too dark.) Maybe it was the sensory overload. The wall to wall action just becomes numbing after a while. Maybe it was because all the character growth and lore was finished, so there was nothing left for 2 hours of movie to do but just watch the inevitable play out. Say what you will about DH Pt 1, but it does stop for character reflection, and it still has a sense of mythology to it. Or maybe I was just ready for the series to be done. (I’m still annoyed that WB made us pay for the same movie twice if we wanted to finish it.)I don’t know if it was the fault of the books or the director, but the Harry Potter series got less interesting to me once David Yates took over. He’s amazing at the action and special effects, sure, but he speeds through the plots, without giving things much time to process. I’ve refused to watch them, but if “narratively incoherent” is a problem with the Fantastic Beasts movies, I can’t say I’m surprised. This has been showing from Yates as early as The Order of the Phoenix. Take for example, this rushed introduction on who or what they actually are:
Yates definitely tanked it with his uninspired blue and grey filters and low energy style.
Part of the challenge in the adaptation is that Order of the Phoenix introduces a lot, including a bunch of new characters, but they don’t really DO much in that book other than exist as the Order, and it’s unclear how critical a role they are going to play in the next books without having a finished Deathly Hollows at the time. You had to still introduce all those characters in case they were Much More Important later— they were going to cut Kreacher when JKR whispered that that would be a bad idea. So OOTP had the unenviable job of just giving you a bunch of people who really didn’t have much to do.
Yates had the misfortune of getting to direct the books Rowling had written after she’d gotten too big to be edited. The first books came out after a lot more editorial guidance, so they’re thankfully a lot more brief. Columbus and Cuaron could work with much more of a complete adaptation, which in Cuaron’s hands lead to some actual, ahem, magic.Yates was brought on board because he had no clout as a director, so Heyman as producer didn’t have to deal with a director with opinions. But then he had to deal with these massive books, and cut them down to just over two hours. So obviously they were going to be clunky.
Its trio of young stars stayed with the franchise the whole time, handled the brain-crushing media attention with grace, and managed not to become cautionary tales.It’s not possible to praise the series’ staff enough for this. Their stars were children when filming on the first movie commenced: Emma Watson was twelve, Daniel Radcliffe was eleven. Rupert Grint was ten. And unless the first movie tanked, they were all instantly going to become among the biggest stars in the world and stay that way all the way through adolescence and early adulthood.It’s hard to even imagine all of the ways in which this could have gone terribly, terribly wrong. Jake Lloyd, Edward Furlong, Corey Feldman, Macauley Culkin – take your pick of counter-examples. But unless Daniel Radcliffe has a storage unit full of mummified hobos that we don’t know about, all of the evidence so far suggests that everyone on the cast has grown up to be a largely well-adjusted human being. The odds against that were astronomical, and it wasn’t a happy accident: the production company had to make a conscious decision to enable (and enforce!) them having a real childhood throughout the decade-long project of making the movies. If only most other producers were as conscientious.
I wonder how much of that ties to the difference in how the British and Americans treat acting as a job. Like, it was easier for them to be relatively well-adjusted humans because the British film industry doesn’t have the same factors that steer child actors into oncoming trains.
I think you got Rupert and Emma’s ages mixed up. But otherwise, you are absolutely right.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2011 Post: The Numbers1. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2, Warner Bros., $381,011,2192. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, Paramount, $352,390,5433. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate, $275,530,7384. The Hangover Part II, Warner Bros., $254,464,3055. Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Disney, $241,063,8756. Fast Five, Universal, $210,031,3257. Cars 2, Disney/Pixar, $191,450,8758. Thor, Paramount, $181,030,6249. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, 20th Century Fox, $176,760,18510. Captain America: The First Avenger, Paramount, $176,654,505Wikipedia1. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2, Warner Bros., $1,342,511,2192. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, Paramount, $1,123,794,0793. Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Disney, $1,045,713,8024. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate, $712,205,8565. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Paramount, $694,713,3806. Kung Fu Panda 2, Paramount/DreamWorks, $665,692,2817. Fast Five, Universal, $626,137,6758. The Hangover Part II, Warner Bros., $586,764,3059. The Smurfs, Sony/Columbia, $563,749,32310. Cars 2, Disney/Pixar, $562,110,557
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)The Dark Knight (2008)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Toy Story 3 (2010)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003)Spider-Man (2002)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Independence Day (1996)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Avatar (2009)Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)Forrest Gump (1994)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)Shrek 2 (2004)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
What metric are you using for “best to worst”? IMDB scores?
Quality of the film, how it compares to the others, and my own preference.
The Harry Potter films were not only successful, they actually influenced and improved their source material. The characters in the books grew less cardboard and more complex as the author clearly started picturing the actors (esp Alan Rickman) in the roles as she wrote.
That’s a random assumption
Other movies could not repeat Harry Potter’s success because other YA novels could not repeat the books’ success either. That phenomenon feels like it will never be repeated in our lifetime.
Ah, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. That movie with the uninteresting fantasy story where the only scene reminiscent of the original was the weakest aspect. If Jerry Bruckheimer had stacked $150 million into a pyramid and set it on fire like the Joker, it would’ve been less of a waste of money.Alfred Molina was good, but, really, when is he not?
No one’s going to see this comment, but the childhood fantasy fan in me feels compelled to point out that The Dark Is Rising series is actually from the 1960s and ’70s, predating Harry Potter quite a bit. I get that the terrible film adaptation was part of Hollywood’s early-2000s YA franchise rush, but there’s a significant difference in the quality and concept between Cooper’s books (which won two Newbury medals) and the many Harry Potter/Hunger Games knockoffs that glutted the YA section at the beginning of the twenty-first century (back when Borders was still a thing!). And not to state the obvious, but the popularity of “pre-pubescent kid discovers they have special powers” conceit was central to YA fantasy series long before Harry Potter. It’s like…pretty much the whole genre.
(You see, I did promise!)That someone dug down to find TDIR to adapt, in hopes of creating Another YA Movie Franchise, is really interesting itself. TDIR (the book) means a lot to me, but I’m used to people not knowing about it or talking about it in the conversation about a lot of other YA/children’s fantasy literature. Sometimes it feels a bit as if the collective consciousness has chosen to forget the YA/children’s fantasy series after Narnia, even though they’re all well-regarded (here I’m thinking not just of TDIR as a series, but The Chronicles of Prydain, and T.H. White’s Arthurian books. It’s hit or miss whether they remember Earthsea.)I would dearly love to see a good adaptation of TDIR. But I fear you’d have to have someone making it who loved it enough to go to bat for what it is, and not what a film studio or cable giant or streaming service thought they wanted it to be. (Like a Peter Jackson doing LOTR. Only obviously MUCH smaller in scale.)
Next time writing about fantasy franchises, try doing it without watching basketball first.
Very little discussion about Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s very stylish, it really blew the spiderwebs off the franchise. Yates is very good, with some memorable moments, but Azkaban did it with less effort and with a lower budget. Also, Yates had the advantage of Rowling getting better and more epic with her story. Azkaban as a book and plot was unremarkable, a Back to the Future II knockoff plot. Cuaron took that plot and made the movie incredible using his talent and vision.
Love Potter. Saw and bought my first book one while working on a network setup at a grade school. They were all on the table for sale brought in by a teacher who I knew. So I said sure and bought the first book, it was all that there was at the time.
It made my weekend and many after that.
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BEST MOVIES & WEB SERIES SUGGESTION/REVIEW SITE | Top MostFilms Adviser is a website where we can find out about any type of movie we need in a matter of moments. This website contains many new movies as well as old movies. IMDB ratings of the movie are also given here. This website provides detailed information about all the directors, producers, actors and actresses. All the details about the movie are mentioned on this website. From actors and actresses to movie stories, plots are all mentioned on this website. How much money is being spent on making the movie and how much money is being earned in that movie is all mentioned here. In a word, this website is full of movie related topics. The most interesting thing about Film Adviser is that you have searched for a movie for the first time but have not found any information about it, but you will get that information as soon as you search. Because this website automatically finds and updates the information of that movie from the internet. And this is only possible on this website. In a word, it is possible to get all the information about cinema here inhttps://filmsadviser.com/#Best_Movie_&_Web_Series