First Things First…
I was still in college and working at a movie theater for this movie and I think saw it with all my siblings again. Since I loved the movie version of Sorcerer’s Stone at the time (I still like it but see its flaws a lot more clearly now), I couldn’t wait for this to open. I’ve seen it a few times since, but as I’m about to watch it now, not having watched it in a few years and really wanting to look at it critically, I’m not sure what I’m going to think.
6 Things I Like
6. “What exactly is the function of a rubber duck?”
This is such a stupid, throwaway line from Mr. Weasley that’s not in the book, yet I still remember it and quote it all these years later. If it has any purpose, it’s just to show what a goofball he is. And how he really has no understanding of Muggles, despite that being his job. But I have to throw it in here because it’s so memorable.
5. Moaning
I like movie Moaning Myrtle way more than book Moaning Myrtle.
She’s played by Shirley Henderson, who was 37 by the time the movie came out. She looks young enough to pass for a teenager, but maybe the fact that she is, in fact, older adds to how unsettling she is. That, along with the misty voice that can suddenly get very angry and then quite plaintive at the drop of a hat. I don’t mind her in the book, either, though she can get annoying at times. But she’s a really fun part of the movie. And she can make you feel sympathy even while she’s so weird.
4. Escaping the Dursleys
They don’t linger too long with the Dursleys… just long enough to show how rough Harry has had it all summer. After the incident with the cake that Dobby causes, it’s pretty alarming to actually see Vernon put bars on Harry’s window. So it’s equally triumphant to see Ron, Fred, and George tear those bars off.
This is also our first look at the flying Ford Anglia, which plays a huge role throughout the story. It’s another scene that looks great on screen.
3. Impeccable Translation from Page to Screen
Lucius Malfoy is amazing on page and screen. Jason Isaacs is also a tremendous addition to the cast. He’s the perfect sneering, contemptuous villain. One of the best things about him is that he’s not a hothead like Draco, but he’s way more calculating. He treats everyone horribly, from Harry to Dumbledore to Mr. Weasley to Dobby.
His introduction in Flourish and Blotts is particularly great. Everything he does has malice and contempt. From the way he uses his snake staff to push aside Harry’s bangs and get his first look at his scar, to the way he talks down to Arthur right in front of his kids, even to the way he acknowledges that he knows who Hermione is, yet it’s clearly not a compliment.
Lucius is not the story’s main villan, of course, but he’s as cold as they come.
2. Follow the Spiders
Who can’t relate to Ron’s fear of spiders? I’d be terrified if I saw hundreds of regular-sized spiders swarming and fleeing together. To walk into the hollow belonging to Aragog and his giant spiders?
I’d rather face Voldemort one on one.
Rupert Grint kills it in this scene. Ron’s reactions as Harry is oblivious to the spiders surrounding them are awesome.
This is also one of the best action scenes of the movie, especially when Mr. Weasley’s car saves them and outruns the spiders and gets them out of the forest. But it’s also important for providing more information to Harry and Ron, and to the audience. We learn from Aragog that he wasn’t the monster in the Chamber of Secrets, and Hagrid didn’t open it.
There are also a few ways where this is played even better than it is in the book.
For one thing, I don’t question the fact that Aragog would let his children eat Harry and Ron, like I do in the book. Here, he’s much more menacing. He doesn’t have any “humanizing” lines about Hagrid helping him find a wife. Or, more pointedly, about how he’s never harmed any human simply because Hagrid is such a good guy and he respects him so much. Instead, Hagrid’s miscalculation about how Harry and Ron would be treated if they followed the spiders is a lot more believable.
Also, I love how the car just shows up out of nowhere to save them. It’s more dramatic than in the book, when they saw it a few minutes earlier. We know from the beginning of the story that it went into the forest, and that’s all we needed so that it doesn’t come across like a deux ex machina.
1. The Chamber of Secrets
I had the same reaction when I first saw the Chamber as I did when I first read about it. I couldn’t help but compare it to the Temple of Doom.
They don’t actually look alike, but they’re both dark, scary places where children are captured. The Chamber of Secrets would be cool even if it were just a myth — a giant chamber hidden within Hogwarts that Salazar Slytherin built secretly and kept his pet monster in.
But the movie’s depiction of it is really cool, especially with the line of giant snake pillars, and the huge Slytherin head, where the Basilisk can exit through the mouth. It’s a fantastic setting for the climax. It’s not exactly like it’s described in the book, but it’s equally dark and foreboding, and it still looks great.
4 Things I’m Mixed About
4. Hagrid’s Return
On one hand, Hagrid’s relationship with Harry (and Ron and Hermione, too) is such a huge part of the first two books. So adding this moment to the movie, where he comes into the Great Hall during the end-of-year feast, and has this tender moment with Harry, who cleared his name so he could get out of Azkaban, is really nice and makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, the big hug Harry gives Hagrid in front of the whole school, with his friends looking on and smiling, and Dumbledore doing the same, is just so cheesy — even for this.
And it kind of makes Hagrid seem like the star, since the movie ends on his triumphant return, with the whole school (minus the Slytherins) cheering for him.
3. The Dueling Club
This is a fun scene. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
After Snape embarrasses Lockhart, he smartly suggests they teach the kids how to block unfriendly spells first. Does he actually mean to disarm them? Because that’s what he just did by using Expelliarmus.
When Harry and Draco go up to demonstrate, Lockhart tells them to disarm, not to block. But they don’t actually teach them anything.
More than anything, this feels like a scene where they just wanted to make it look cool and to get to the big reveal that Harry is a Parselmouth. And if the logic isn’t all there, who cares? It also takes Lockhart forever to react. I mean, Snape gives half a smile when Draco casts a spell on “2” and it’s not to disarm. But Lockhart sees it happen, gives Harry time to get up and cast a spell of his own before ever saying anything.
2. Too Much Like Magic
Harry being able to summon Gryffindor’s sword is a huge deal — in a very practical and immediate way, because he uses it to slay the Basilisk — but in a deeper way, it shows him that he is a true Gryffindor, and his fears that the Sorting Hat put him in the wrong House are unfounded.
But I don’t like the way the sword just materializes out of thin air. In the book, he actually pulls it from the Hat. Maybe that’s no better, but for some reason this just looks so much more unbelievable. Like, he’s facing this huge monster, and suddenly, this weapon just appears like magic. Now I know, it’s a story about magic. But again, it just looks unbelievable, even by wizarding standards.
1. A Kinder, Gentler Snape
Even when Snape is yelling at Harry and Ron about the Whomping Willow and telling them he would expel them if it was up to him, his face expresses concern more than anger.
It’s weird, because we know from Sorcerer’s Stone how easily Alan Rickman can show his contempt for Harry. But he goes through this movie always seeming more concerned and curious — like at the scene of Mrs. Norris’s petrification — than hateful. That’s in no way the Snape we know. And yet, I can’t help but kind of like the interpretation, even though I know I shouldn’t.
7 Things I Don’t Like
7. “Avada …”
I’m not sure if I ever picked up on this in the past because he doesn’t speak loudly or clearly here…
But when Lucius realizes that Harry has just duped him into freeing Dobby, he stalks toward Harry, pulls out his wand, and goes to curse him. And if Dobby doesn’t stop Lucius, it sure seems like he’s about to use the killing curse.
I don’t like this because Lucius should be smarter and more even-tempered. He’s the one who tells Draco earlier that it’s not prudent to appear to dislike Harry. And as mad as he might be that he just lost his servant — and got outsmarted by a 12-year-old in the process — what does he really think is going to happen by killing Harry right outside Dumbledore’s office?
It’s an added flourish that’s not in the book, but it’s just unnecessary. Simply stalking toward him in a menacing way and pulling out his wand without appearing like he’s about to kill Harry would be more than enough.
6. Easy to Manipulate?
When Harry realizes that his good friend Tom (shoutout to Binge Mode) isn’t really his good friend, Riddle almost completely glosses over how he was able to convince Ginny to do his bidding. He just says that she was so easy to convince, but he leaves out how much time she spent writing in the journal, how he had to earn her trust.
Maybe they felt that, since they didn’t harp on her potential guilt at all — Harry isn’t worried about keeping her name out of things when he tells his story, Dumbledore never has to specify that she won’t be punished, and she never has to guiltily face her parents — that it isn’t necessary to show that it actually took a lot to get her to do everything,
But even without focusing on her guilt, I think this still makes Ginny look a lot worse than it should. She’s a Weasley — and a first-year. They should do everything they can to make it clear that she was totally manipulated.
5. “You’ll pay for that, Malfoy.”
When Malfoy first drops his “Mudblood” line, it’s like there’s a delayed reaction from everyone. Ron still pulls out his wand as he says this to defend Hermione and then has it backfire, so he winds up puking slugs for awhile. But he says it almost nonchalantly, and it’s not like everyone else is climbing all over each other to get at Malfoy.
In the book, people want to beat the shit out of him.
Here, it’s a quick scene, and it doesn’t capture how critical this is as the start of the bigotry that becomes so pervasive.
4. A Buffoon from the Start
From the moment Lockhart shows up, you know he’s a buffoon and a fraud. There’s no way this idiot can possibly be the great wizard people think he is.
It takes a lot longer to establish that in the book. Sure, his actions don’t always (or ever) match up with his reputation. But he seems even more outlandish here, which I don’t think helps.
3. The Polyjuice Fiasco
Despite the incredible effects when they show how the potion backfired on Hermione, there are two things I don’t like about this.
One is that (for the sake of time, I’m sure) you don’t at all get the sense of how difficult it is to brew this. Hermione says it when she finds it in Most Potente Potions, but that’s about it. Everything from having to get a teacher’s permission to even get that book from the restricted section, to stealing some of the hard-to-find ingredients from Snape’s private stores, is skipped.
Second is that when Harry and Ron, disguised as Crabbe and Goyle, make it into the Slytherin common room with Malfoy, they’re complete idiots.
Part of it might be that it’s two inexperienced actors who are acting like other characters disguised as their characters, and that can be hard to pull off. (Actually, even Tom Felton seems like he doesn’t know how to deal with them in this scene.) But also, Harry and Ron are both reacting to every horrible thing Malfoy says. It’s really stupid to think that, in the heat of the moment, they just forgot that they’re undercover, because all they have to do is look at each other to remember. The whole scene comes off poorly, even though it’s where they get the critical information that Malfoy isn’t the Heir of Slytherin.
2. Solving Riddle’s Diary
In the book, Harry is fascinated — almost entranced — by Riddle’s diary. He’s constantly taking it out and flipping through it, knowing there must be something special about it. But he never actually comes up with the idea to write in it until he spills ink all over his bag and books, yet the diary remains perfectly clean.
Here, as soon as Harry picks up the diary in the bathroom, the first thing he does when he brings it back up to his dorm room is to open it and write in it. No hints, no reason for thinking anything like what happens will happen. It lacks any logic why he would do that, or why specifically he would write to the person the diary belonged to.
1. Hermione’s Discovery
Just like with the Polyjuice Potion and the diary, we miss the setup and only get the payoff.
We don’t get Hermione’s lightbulb moment at breakfast, where we realize she’s figured it out but just wants to check the library to be sure, and doesn’t tell Harry or Ron what it is.
Instead, we just get McGonagall canceling the Quidditch match and bringing Harry and Ron into the hospital wing to see that Hermione has been petrified without having any idea that she had even separated from them.
What would it have taken to show that she had that revelation first? 30 seconds? But it would’ve been so important so because Harry and Ron would’ve known she figured it out, which would make her current state all the worse.
Final Thoughts
It’s a fun movie, much like the first one. I don’t like how some things feel less important because the setup is glossed over. I mentioned a few of them — Hermione having the lightbulb moment where we realize that she’s figured out what’s in the Chamber, Harry constantly messing around with Riddle’s diary before figuring out how it works, the difficulties of making the Polyjuice Potion.
There are also still some issues with the acting, though the kids have all improved from Sorcerer’s Stone.
But there are some exciting action pieces, especially in the Chamber with the Basilisk and Fawkes, and in the forest with Aragog and his children.
This is still an easy rewatch, despite having plenty of flaws.
Tim Matassa
