Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Movie)

Synopsis

Harry is an abused boy who finds out he is a wizard. While attending a new wizarding school and meeting new friends, he finds that an old enemy of his family has returned to kill him.

Review

For how young the casts is for the most part, they do an outstanding job and I believe that is due to the legacy of their mentors. Most the adult cast has an extensive legacy of acting and those pointers and friendship really do push the younger cast members to greater heights.

There is a lot of CGI in this and I remember back in the day it looked great, but now with 4k and better TVs around, you can start to see the age. It isn't completely distracting, but it is noticeable. However, that is blown away by a lot of the practical affects that are done. Especially the scenes with Hagrid. Using a combination of forced perspective and double shooting, you get the feeling that Hagrid is massively bigger than he actually is to the actors.

As this is based on the book, it is important to talk about the major differences. Overall, remember that when doing something like this, they have a limited time to tell a huge story. So for that, this movie does a great job relaying the story of the [[Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone]] book. There is not a lot of major story elements that are changed and most of those are small just to make the conversations concise. A for instance of this is the conversation of Harry with Firenze in the forrest.

My Rating

ABC Family TV has basically made the holidays a Harry Potter marathon and since I have been doing a lot of traveling and the announcement of the Harry Potter TV show I thought it was appropriate to watch them again. With that, this series starts off with a bang at a 7 or 8. I am going to give it an 8 as I think that because I have seen the first 3 movies so many times that I am just annoyed with that and know them so there is nothing special about them, but I remember really loving it when I first watched it and that hasn't left.

Parental Rating

My mom has found memories of these movies. No language, no sex, and it is designed for families. The violence is mostly slap stick in the early ones. My dad on the other hand does not like the content. I can VIVIDLY remember being at Sam's Club when I lifted up the box for either World of Warcraft or Warcraft 3 and my dad saying "We will not have any games about witchcraft in the house". I was very confused. Either way, based on the rules there isn't any reason he would reject it. So approved by both, even though my dad would never choose to watch it himself.

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