My favourite books never lived up to my expectations as films. Prisoner of Azkaban left out my favourite scenes and butchered my favourite character and Half Blood Prince was barely recognisable.
It's a toss-up between Order of the Phoenix and Philosopher's Stone. I'm going to have to go with the latter.
The characters look and behave more like I always imagined them, there's a real magic feel to it because, like the book, it focuses a lot on the idiosyncrasies of life at Hogwarts, and I think maybe because I was younger, it blew me away when I saw it on the big screen.
I also felt like this took a back seat and just let the story unfold whereas the other films, as the books become more developed and their plots more intricate, rushed a lot of the story and left out quirky scenes or treated minor characters to a token glimpse from the camera.
The Philosopher's Stone is the only one of the films that I felt had all the magic of the books. The Deathly Hallows Part 2 was also fantastic but I felt that it was a little too dark. The book also had a little dark humour that this film shied away from for obvious reasons. I cried for 70% of the film and though I left feeling it was one of the best films I had ever seen, I feel as though the first is still the best adaptation.
Hi! It's mischief1managed from fanfiction.net! I guess I kind of stalked your profile... I read (and loved) a bunch of your stories and I was about to go read some more, because I haven't in a while, when I saw this! Glad I'm not the only one to blog about their fanfiction.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right about Philosopher's stone focusing on the idiosyncrasies of life at Hogwarts. I mean, the book is more about that, too. I think the function of the story was to just introduce us to Harry, his friends, and the world, and what made it so magical. And I'll always love it because of that. You're right--the quirky scenes were really only shown in the first movie. It has so many more quotes than the others, for example. I think the characters are most characterized in the first movie. I really liked the third movie because of the beautiful cinematography, but the actual story and characters were quite butchered. I actually didn't really like DH part 2 (I wrote about that on my blog after I saw the premiere.) It butchered too much of the story and didn't stand alone as a movie, I thought.
Nice blog, I'll be reading more!