So, I watched all the Harry Potter movies recently...

First of, when the first Harry Potter movie released in 2001, I was only 9 years old but I thought it was the best thing ever. I was hooked. Since then, I watched every single movie as they released, and haven't rewatched a single one since.

My realization upon rewatching the franchise this week is this:

1. The shift in tone between the first two movies and the rest of the franchise is far from 'a gradual descent into darkness' that I sometimes see people discuss and more of a complete 180 in tone between Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban, and I find myself wondering what the franchise would've felt like if it had stuck with that magical, mystique of the first two movies. That 'fantasy' feeling made the world feel all that more magical and immersive to me and would've been great for suspension of disbelief

2. Sirius Black. If you're not a book reader, it seems near impossible to get invested in Harry's relationship with Sirius Black. He's absent for the vast majority of the Prisoner of Azkaban, shows up raving like a lunatic, and then just some minute later has a very intimate moment with Harry about moving in with him and then the movie ends shortly after. Then, he's practically entirely absent from the next movie other than appearing as a head in the fireplace. The next movie after that, he dies in what is supposed to be a very heartfelt scene. Problem is, upon rewatching, I felt nothing because they didn't do much to establish him. I didn't read the books and almost his entire relationship with Harry Potter happened off-screen

3. The redesign of Hogwarts felt a little jarring. I noticed locations established previously in the franchise had their layouts altered or completely remade on a topographic level (such as the school's location in relation to Hagrid's cabin and the location of the Whomping Willow). In the case of the Whomping Willow, it felt all the more noticeable that it was moved in Prisoner of Azkaban given that it was an actual (albeit minor) plot point in the movie directly prior to this one

4. Magic spells just seem to do random effects. I'll reiterate here that I haven't read the books, but I don't feel like reading the source material should be a requirement to understand the movie adaptations. But, perhaps there's an explanation for this one in the books. The best noticeable example of the inconsistency seemed to me to be in Prisoner of Azkaban when Snape confronts Sirius and Lupin at the end. He storms in, yells out "EXPELLIARMUS!" and the wands fly out of their hands and nothing else. Now, about a minute later in the same scene, Harry Points his wand at Snape and yells out "EXPELLIARMUS!" and Snape goes flying like a ragdoll into the wall and collapses a bed. I believe this also happened during the Wizard duel in Chamber of Secrets, too (?). In either case, they both cast the same spell but it did entirely different things. It seems to just do whatever the story needs it to do at the time. Whether or not the characters need to pronounce any spell or just point a wand at something also varies scene to scene

5. Wandless Magic. This elaborates a little on the previous point, but I was made to believe that wandless magic was something done with great difficulty. Yet, we see it constantly in the background or side characters in the franchise. At the Leaky Cauldron, we have that one wizard casually stirring his drink with magic while reading a book, but then in that exact same scene a bartender just disappears a bottle with what looks like sleight of hand magic. And this occurs all over the movies. It seems almost any random person can do wandless magic at will

6. Voldemort is not that interesting as a threat. This is one of my most recent realizations. As you may have noticed from my examples here, Prisoner of Azkaban ended up being my favourite out of the series upon rewatching, and I also realized it didn't really have much to do with Voldemort. It was, for the most part, a very self-contained story and completely interesting in its own right. I much preferred the mystery (and eventual 'twist') of the Sirius Black plot line than the overarching story of the franchise. Voldemort as a character isn't, to me, particularly interesting but just seems the typical antagonist, void of any redeeming or likable traits.

7. By the time of The Half Blood Prince, it felt like the franchise was simultaneously dragging and yet not giving us enough time to invest in the characters. There were at this point several characters in the movies with names to remember but whose screen time was so limited they'd not earned any emotional investment. Kingsley Shacklebolt, for example, had an interesting name and character design but you don't really get to know anything about him. Somewhere in the process of adapting the books to movies I imagine most character depth was lost, so while they appear in the movies you never really get to know them. So, by Deathly Hallows Part 1 we're 7 movies into the franchise and felt like I hadn't had a proper break from the Voldemort plot line since Prisoner of Azkaban + Triwizard Tournament in Goblet of Fire three movies ago. In that sense it felt like it was dragging, yet when it comes to getting to know most of the characters it felt like we hadn't gotten nearly enough to invest in their welfare.

Now, I'm not going to make this its own number on the list but I will say that a lot of the things that took me out of the movies were inconsistencies. Some of you will feel like I am nitpicking. For one, I didn't really bring up the time turners, because then I'd have to delve into the random plot devices (in the case of time turners sometimes called plot holes) that exist solely to get us from point A to point B and then never to be used again (despite the existence of time turners leading massive implications about the universe). See, a random mcguffin like that would've fit a lot better into the tone and atmosphere of the first two movies that Chris Columbus directed. Tonally, those movies felt like they were just magical, soft fantasy worlds where anything could happen, and a random magical mcguffin wouldn't break my suspension of disbelief. When the franchise transitioned into that more bleak, realistic tone, something like a magical mcguffin just stood out more.

Submitted June 21, 2020 at 06:36PM by TheGreatMalagan https://ift.tt/2AVgmXe