In common with most of the world I went to see the new Harry Potter film at the weekend. Wow. It looks fantastic and the acting is brilliant. It’s hard to pick out the best bits, as it moves like greased lightning and is totally absorbing, but the part when the great snake, Nagini, hurls herself at the audience is a real shocker, then there’s the sheer look of the Ministry of Magic (black, shining and threatening) Snape walking confidently through iron gates which turn to smoke, and the heart-stopping chase as Voldemort and his Deatheaters chase Harry and Hagrid as they escape from Privet Drive.
The story of the Three Brothers where the Hallows come into the story is beautifully done, in a sort of Eastern European paper-cut-out cartoon. It’s exactly right for that fairy-tale atmosphere. However, one of the terrific bits of the book is when, after having heard the tale of the legendary Hallows, Harry, Ron and Hermione realise they actually have one of the hallows themselves, the Invisibility Cloak which Harry had owned ever since his first year at school. The sadness of Luna’s disappearance and the mounting tension and sheer creepiness of her unexplained absence is missing from the film too. However, you can’t have everything and there’s always the book to re-read.
Speaking of which, I’m sure someone somewhere (perhaps quite a lots of someones somewhere) will be grumbling about the amount of knowledge you have to bring to the film. Well, yes you do. If you’ve been living in a box for the last few years and have never heard of Harry Potter, don’t begin here! It’ll be fairly baffling, so go back to the beginning and read/watch the Philosopher’s Stone.
It’s always hard, with such a well-loved book, to translate it to the screen, as you necessarily miss out on a great deal of the subtlety that makes the book so rewarding. By and large, less is more, but with Harry Potter, more is actually more. The Deathly Hallows is a long book but you need that many words to make the world live.
And isn’t it interesting? A book is so personal. It’s one person with their imagination and a keyboard, conjuring up a world that will take hundreds of people to bring to life on the screen.
Having read and loved the book, it’s really hard to come away from the cinema when the story’s half-told. I really wanted to carry on, to see the ending. I was only glad I knew what happened! Incidentally, if anyone wants to have a master-class in how to write action, read the battle of Hogwarts at the end of the Deathly Hallows. Action is where film comes into it’s own, of course. It’s far easier to see a punch than write about it, to show an explosion that to describe it and to keep action going over pages is really hard. (I know! Believe me, I know!) But JK Rowling does it superbly well, so it’s an edge-of-your-seat read that simply keeps on going.
So book or film? Ah, c’mon, do we really have to choose? After all, we’ve got both to love!
A heretic speaks, I mean posts...I've never read a Harry Potter book and don't especially want to. I'd probably enjoy them, I admit; I enjoyed "Lord of the Rings" but read that about ten years after everyone else, because my friends wouldn't stop nagging me till I had. Maybe I'll get round to Potter in the next couple of decades. But there's one brilliant thing about Rowling's books that I fully appreciate without reading them. They are BOOKS first and foremost; they've encouraged countless youngsters to READ. That's what all writers and readers long to do. And I'm really glad that you need to have some knowledge of the books to get the most from the film; that says, to me, that the film has stayed true to the book in a way that, sadly, the first Lord of the Rings film didn't. (Don't know about the sequel films as I never bothered with those.) It is wonderful when film-makers stick as closely as they can to the original. Did anyone see the film of the science-fiction classic DUNE, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but I've been told by others who hadn't read the book first that they could barely make head or tail of it.
ReplyDelete