Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone [2001]

As the first of a franchise, this has a lot of character-introduction and plot-set-up [efficiently managed by screenwriter Steve Kloves] to go through before it gets to its rather thin actual story [the title even gives away what the mysterious whatsit the villain is out to steal will turn out to be]. The destined-to-be-a-smash adaptation of the J.K. Rowling novel does almost everything right, but is still somehow nice rather than amazing. It's a film with John Williams rather than a Danny Elfman doing the score, and what we get is very much a tidy fantasy [like a mega-budgeted version of those 1960s BBC tea-time serials] whose job is to remind audiences how much they liked the book rather than to take wing on its own and become a real children's film classic like, say, The Wizard of Oz or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Like much fantasy, the core is essentially conservative with perhaps even a fascist tinge: young Harry [Daniel Radcliffe], our hero, may look like a refugee from the Jennings novels but is so predestined for greatness that everyone in the film knows it and the Sword-in-the-Stone business of being the abused orphan kept under the stairs in suburban hell by his horrid uncle [Richard Griffiths] and aunt [Fiona Shaw] is out of the way very quickly. With its unveiled contempt for 'muggles' [ie: us – the unmagical], it appeals to that I'm-secretly-a-princess strand of fantasy, and its embrace of an [admittedly co-ed and discreetly multi-racial] outmoded style of boarding school as a magical escape from mundanity, accessed by a Platform 9 ¾ at King's Cross, is interesting in that it drops even the token no-place-like-home attitudes of the Oz or Narnia books. The punchline is Harry's realisation that by leaving school [for the holidays] he's not going home, which sets up a possible quandary in later books and films that might even be interesting. Here, the big twist is that we are supposed to think Alan Rickman will turn out to be the villain but actually it's Ian Hart. The moment which ought to entail a loss [Harry's pal playing chess with real people pieces and sacrificing himself so Harry can complete his quest] turns out not to be fatal, and even the snobbish anti-Harry pupil is an envious creep rather than a real threat. Everyone, from the head wizard [Richard Harris] through pretend-stern sidekick [Maggie Smith] to the hulking groundskeeper [Robbie Coltrane], cossets Potter so much, affording him privileges which are his right by heritage rather than character, that it becomes hard actually to like the little fellow. Certainly, his slightly misfit friends, wild-haired and superior Hermione [Emma Watson] and ginger working class bumbler Weasley [Rupert Grint], are more immediately appealing characters.

The art direction has a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang look, with lots of cod-Dickensian clutter and character actors in big beards, but the effects [a troll, a cloaked master villain, aerial jousts on broomsticks in a 49-man-squamish-like made-up game, a big three-headed dog, giant chessmen, a centaur] are CGI seamless and somehow too clean. The magical woods aren't wild enough [this is Chris Columbus of Bicentennial Man, not Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam] and voyages through the perilous cellars are play-station game levels rather than Harryhausen set-pieces or mythical analogues for anything in the real world. Too often, Columbus emphasises how magical it all is by cutting to the smiling face of Radcliffe. And where are the prefects, the bullying, the fagging, the buggery, the fees? Maybe in later books … which may well put the films in a hard position when it comes to the growing-up rites-of-passage sequels.

First published in this form here.

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