May 24, 2004
HP&TPOA
Because Laura is special, she scored some sneak preview passes to Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Not really spoilers, but just in case.
I've read all the books, so it's hard to review a single movie that is already two books behind.
At over two hours, this installment seems pretty long. It's also much darker than the last two HP movies. The pace of the film seems slower, and less time is spent on reinforcing the 'prettiness' and 'perfection' of the Witches' world. It seems that as Harry and his friends grow older, the dangers of their world are becoming more apparent.
The movie was pretty faithful to the book, only skipping character-building sections devoted to minor characters, such as the Weasley twins and Professor Trelawny
I do wonder how the director will handle the actors' changing appearances as they age. The kids are supposed to be thirteen, and they look about sixteen now. By the time the sixth movie comes out, they'll have grey hair.
If you've not read the book, you'll probably find it more suspenseful than I did. In all, it's a fun movie, well worth the cash you'll spend to see it, and will undoubtably be the summer kids' movie blockbuster.
Posted by Eric at May 24, 2004 10:20 AMI was under the impression that they were only doing the first three movies, because of the age problem....
Posted by: Sam at May 24, 2004 04:52 PMI hope they keep them on for the whole series...if they make the next movie fast enough they should be able to, since once you hit about 14 or 15 it's not such a huge difference anymore. You can't really change the actors with something like this, it's kind of like having someone else play Luke Skywalker in ROTJ. I mean, you have actors in their late 20's playing high school kids in other movies, so I think we can suspend our disbelief long enough to think that a 16 year old is really 14.
Posted by: sushi at May 25, 2004 09:01 AM