Awful acting, chunks of terrible directing, super obvious and heavy-handed with some of its characters, stupid dialogue and overall an unbelievable cheesy movie, and just plain stupidity in its plot. Very little makes sense from a logic point of view - even though there's magic which isn't logical, but how people behave, wtf??
shareI'll give you the acting in some parts by the young leads. The adults however are near perfect. Tom Felton is pretty good, probably the best of the kids.
What's wrong with the dialogue, plot, logic, etc? It's a fantasy film, you shouldn't expect real world logic anyways. What isn't logical about their behavior specifically. I'm not saying you're wrong but no examples are given.
I think the directing is fine. I find Chris Columbus a little underrated. There are some much cooler shots in the later films admittedly, Columbus is a simple director. He also talked about this a little in the bonus features, admitted the younger actors were unexperienced so would often have multiple cameras around them and just pick the one who gave a solid performance at the time when cutting. Some of the shots are actually dictated by their lack of acting experience.
Chamber of Secrets is an improvement over the Philosopher's Stone (I'm having a marathon of Harry Potter, since I've never actually seen them from start to finish) It's a much better film and is improved in most aspects.
Well, the dialogue is super heavy handed, it's so obviously clunky and right on the nose, nobody talks like that. By logic I mean first of all, who the hell thinks Hogwarts is safe? They literally say it's the safest place on earth or something and kids literally die there, and the first thing Dumbledore says is "Don't go to the fifth floor, you'll die a painful death" LOL. And the cousin/aunt/uncle of the Dudley's is so frustratingly bad. They don't believe in magic? OK... And they get attacked by mail, this whole thing is stupid and I don't really get their motivation for being so incredibly mean and evil to Harry, there's just no way to believe this simply by having her aunt being a little jealous. This is pretty poor, the direction here is bad, the whole execution of the Dudley's is bad. And poor direction, I mean the reaction to some events, Harry or other actors react very weird to some situations. Out of human logic - since they are still human, that makes the viewing very strange. But anyway. The whole set up of who's evil and who's not is pretty poor, it's so obvious, maybe except for Snape but that twist shoots itself in the foot for being so lame in its reveal. Purple white Jihad wizard explains his super smart plot, the ending is near Scooby Doo level (same goes for The Chamber of Secrets).
The CG is pretty horrible too.
Pretty neat though how much Chamber of Secrets improved on Philosopher's Stone. Do you like that one? I'll be seeing Prisoner of Azkaban tonight and from what I've heard, it's the best one.
I like them all to varying degrees. Deathly Hallows Part 1 is actually my favorite, but probably the least popular to the masses. It's a deliberately small movie, and it feels kind of isolating but that's what it's going for. It feels like a completely adult HP movie.
Prisoner of Azkaban is visually stunning. It's not my favorite, but it is my favorite visually. There's some continuity errors here because Hogwarts is basically completely rearranged, Hagrid's Hut, etc. But I prefer this look. It's a bit darker than the first 2 and you'll see it get even more so in later movies. The sixth movie is literally too dark in some scenes, I always turn the brightness up on TV.
I see what you're saying though. Some of these things are handled and explained better in the books. Dumbledore is considered the strongest wizard of all time, that's why it's called safe, but the things that happen during Harry's time there probably don't happen on a normal school year. Harry Ron and Hermione are always getting in danger but for the rest of students it's generally safe.
The books explain it all better but Aunt Petunia resented her sister for being able to do magic and this turned to disgust over time. Don't want to give anything too much away though because other characters were involved that made her hate all magical people and married the most basic man she can find who hated anything out of the ordinary.
Interesting, I'll be firing up Azkaban any minute now.
shareI found it pretty boring on rewatch last night.
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