Like six gazillion other people, I saw the movie version of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (yes, here it’s the Sorceror’s Stone, but I refuse to participate in the dumbing-down of books) earlier this week, and decided to re-read the book after.
The book, unsurprisingly, is better. Most of the movie’s flaws come from picking the wrong bits of the book to be faithful to, such that lots of useful information gets shoved aside by the parade of individual events that are crammed in. However, the movie also tries to make some of the events more visual, and in doing so makes them make much less sensible (the wand-buying and the chess game are cases in point). Someone else observed that the movie seemed to have been written only for people who had already read the book, which I think is a fair description of the effect, if not necessarily the motivation.
The characters are all cast brilliantly, but their appearances, as fitting as they are, haven’t really displaced my mental images on re-reading the book. Indeed, I prefer my mental image of Dumbledore—though not because the actor does a bad job, but because the script takes all the whimsy out of the role, turning him into a Gandalf clone.
The main problem with the movie is less a problem with the book: the plot is fairly lumpy, with the major drama mostly relegated to the very end. In the book, the charms of discovering the world and learning about Hogwarts help carry the reader past this, as does the knowledge that this is a setup book. I think a movie needs to be more evenly paced, though, and stand better alone. Anyway, the book (and the series as a whole) is charming, though not so good that I re-read it without an outside motivation, like this movie or the release of another book.