Movie Box Review

The boxoffice totals for tonight's midnight screenings of HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2 aren't available quite yet, but it was a remarkable experience to go to a shopping center multiplex and find its 6-story garage filled up to the roof even though every store and restaurant in the place was long closed.  (And then, leaving after 2AM, to walk through the throngs just arriving for 3AM overflow shows.)  J.K. Rowling's 7 novels, and the 8 films based on them, are arguably the most powerful narrative engines of their generation, a combination of plotting, character and a completely imagined, inhabited magical world that's left its contemporaries in the dust. 

If Deathly Hallows Part 1 was the healthy meal audiences needed to consume in order to gather their energy and maintain good health for the struggles ahead, Part 2 is practically all dessert. Where the earlier Potter movies were set over the course of an entire school year, the bulk of Deathly Hallows Part 2 takes place within a single 24-hour period, and it's a collection of mammoth action sequences that keep following one after another.  Unlike, say, some Michael Bay movies one could name, these sequences aren't spectacle simply for the sake of showing off the filmmakers' technical prowess, but carefully crafted steps that proceed toward the confrontation that's been a decade in the making (more than that if you start with the first book's publication):  Harry vs. Voldemort.  

Despite all the budget in the world and a combined 4 1/2 hours of screen time to play with, Deathly Hallows wasn't an easy work for screenwriter Steve Kloves (veteran of all the films except Order of the Phoenix) to adapt.  Rowling's plotting is so dense that thick slices of the novel's pie (Dumbledore's history is mostly gone) still had to be omitted, and short shrift is given to others.  Even the deaths of well-loved characters are sometimes observed only in a couple of shots, and while some iconic characters (Maggie Smith, front and center as Professor McGonagall) are showcased, others (Hagrid) are reduced to a few on-screen moments; when one budding romance is revealed, the characters haven't even shared a scene together in this movie.  

Compared to a typical Hollywood action epic, some of the narrative choices can seem eccentric.  Twice the action is interrupted for long stretches, first (vague Spoiler Alert)  for what is essentially The Severus Snape Story, and then for what readers will recognize as The Dumbledore Railway Scene.  Enormously important twists in the action are determined by obscure rules of wand ownership, which have to be expositioned after the fact.  The latter part of the story becomes somewhat spiritual, in the fairly familiar quasi-religious form that was always latent in a saga that calls its protagonist "The Chosen One," but which the previous stories avoided.  

With all these quirks, the film is a mostly triumphant entertainment.   David Yates, finishing out the series with his fourth consecutive film, moves smoothly from beautifully observed character moments to epic scale, from humorous action sequences that evoke the earliest films in the series (the Gringotts heist) to heartrending revelations about characters we thought we knew.  He's working here with the same technical group as in Deathly Hallows Part 1, including cinematographer Eduardo Serra, editor Mark Day and composer Alexandre Desplat, all of whom do beautiful work; special note should be taken in this installment of Stuart Craig's massive production design (no doubt aided seamlessly by CG) for the war-torn Hogwarts, and the combination of make-up technicians and CG wizards who pulled off the how-are-they-gonna-do-this? epilogue.  (The 3D is a conversion, and while it's not necessary by any means, it's quite good as conversions go.)

The Potter series, though, has most distinguished itself from all other franchises by the phenomenal skill of its cast.  Even the Lord of the Rings series didn't have the depth of characterization and quality of performance that these films have drawn; for this final installment, Ciaran Hinds and Kelly McDonald join the astonishing ensemble.  With all the plotting and action, and the return of many old characters (dead and alive), inevitably while Rupert Grint and Emma Watson are impeccable, they have less to do here than they did in Deathly Hallows Part 1, where they were responsible for carrying whole chunks of the story.  Part 2, though, is very much Daniel Radcliffe's movie, as Harry pieces together the story of his own life, learning truths about himself that Rowling had been nursing through 6 previous books; his stunned disillusion and then his resolute decisions to go on anyway are as inspiring as those of any screen hero one can name.  There's nothing glib about the character or the performance; Harry's ultimate heroism is his insistence on being ordinary.

It's unlikely that we'll see the like of the Potter series again, at least for quite a while, although we'll certainly get  many attempts to duplicate its appeal.  (Coming next year:  The Hunger Games, to name just one.)  Its original author, the filmmakers, cast and crews have done an exemplary job in a genre that's often a cynical display of trailer moments with no particular interest in context.  And credit is due, too, to Warner Bros:  it can't be a coincidence that two of the three best franchises of the past decade, Potter and Christopher Nolan's Batman films, come from the same studio (and the third, Lord of the Rings, was from New Line, a Warners division).  One can't begrudge them any of their billions.

There are people already begging J.K. Rowling to come back to Hogwarts and keep the stories going (and no doubt Warners would be happiest of all if she did).  But think about the last Indiana Jones movie, the last Godfather, Wall Street 2.  Rowling and the thousands responsible for making the films have managed to bring an epic tale to a satisfying conclusion.  Harry Potter deserves to enjoy his life.

When the announcement was made that Warner Bros would split HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS into 2 full-length movies, there was a certain amount of cynicism about studio greed--and, indeed, why not pick up an extra billion or so if the opportunity arises?  But really, J.K. Rowling's novels have all been stuffed so full of plot that any of the adaptations could have been 2 movies long--as it is, readers had been complaining all along about the scenes and storylines that had to be cut for time.  (For that matter, this season HBO spent 10 hours on a single volume of Game of Thrones--just nominated for a slew of Emmys--and nobody seemed to have a problem with that.)  

Dividing Deathly Hallows in particular, though, guaranteed that the first film would be what is almost certainly the bleakest, most unsettling movie in the history of giant Hollywood franchises--a picture so awash in futility and death that if it were a standalone project, it probably couldn't get financed, much less muster a deluxe $150M+ budget.  The first half of the Deathly Hallows novel and film presents the Harry Potter saga at low ebb, with its central characters spending much of its length wandering through an unforgiving countryside at a complete loss, falling apart emotionally and failing at all of their goals; they're like Beckett protagonists with wands. 

All of which makes Deathly Hallows (Part 1) perhaps the trickiest production of the whole series, and despite its inherent difficulties, in some ways a special triumph for the filmmakers and stars.  David Yates, directing his third consecutive chapter, has to craft the film out of the bare essentials of the saga; most of the huge supporting cast is reduced to brief appearances, there's no Hogwarts at all, and only a few action sequences.  (Although this film isn't about its guest stars, added to the cast this time--in case the series didn't already have enough great British actors--are Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans and Peter Mullen.)

Behind the camera this time is Eduardo Serra, the French cinematographer whose works include Girl With a Pearl Earring and many of the later films of Claude Chabrol; once the film has left the city and its black-walled Ministry of Magic, Serra's images becomes warmer than those in Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince, with gorgeous landscapes that emphasize the smallness of these teenagers as they try to defeat a mad and murderous army.  The composer is Alexandre Desplat, whose superb recent scores include The King's Speech and The Tree of Life; his music here is more delicate than any other Potter score (John Williams' original theme is barely to be heard).  Mark Day again serves as Yates' editor, keeping the pace moving forward even as the characters are in stasis.  Stuart Craig is the production designer, as he's been all along; note the subtle way the sequences in the Muggle world, although set in ordinary places like cafes and public restrooms, are slightly off-kilter, odd in a way that suggests a world alien to witches and wizards.  The special effects, often cartoonish and obvious in 2001 (although state-of-the-art at the time), have become so realistic that they seem as real as the sets, and special note should be made of a lovely, distinctive animated sequence that explains the story of the Deathly Hallows themselves.

Ultimately, though, while Deathly Hallows is part of an epic adventure, it's a very intimate story, and the fact that the film is so compelling has to be credited to screenwriter Steve Kloves and the stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson.  Those three (and for a chunk of the time, just Radcliffe and Watson)  carry almost an hour of screen time virtually alone, an accomplishment they seem to bring off with ease.  (Kloves, Radcliffe and Watson have justly been praised for adding the brief, exhausted dance between Harry and Hermione that isn't in the book.)  Although there were some complaints about the story's relentlessly grim focus on Harry, Ron and Hermione, it was yet another very smart decision by Rowling and then Yates and Kloves:  staying closer to those three, without the distraction of huge sets and starry supporting characters, and watching them suffer and struggle, only brings the audience more into their story, heightening the emotions for the grand finale.

And so:  the cliff is hanging, the advance ticket sales are record-breaking, the clocks are ticking to 12:01AM.  All that remains is for film projectors around the world to be switched to "On."  

It was all so cute when it started...

David Yates' 2009 HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE is surprisingly funny at times--surprising, because in all other ways the film was, up to that point, by far the grimmest entry in the series.  It's curiously structured:  part romantic comedy, complete with love potions and pining teenagers, and part a baleful story that begins in the immediate aftermath of one tragic death and ends with another, one that will clearly just begin the reign of terror hitting the Potter universe..   

The visual transformation that began with Order of the Phoenix continues in Half-Blood Prince:  the photography, this time by Bruno Delbonnel (his films include Amelie and Across the Universe), is so desaturated that the last reels are almost a greenish-tinged black and white.  Hagrid, the living soul of Hogwarts, is barely present in the film.  The magic portraits and friendly ghosts have vanished from the school, and the hallways themselves seem to have closed in on the students.  Nicholas Hooper's score is a subdued version of his music for Phoenix. The violence, when it comes, is sudden and deadly; no longer do the wizards and witches proudly call out their spells as they wield their wands; much of the time they don't speak at all or mutter the words under their breath.  Yates and his team wring a desolately gripping beauty from this apocalyptic world, with its Death-Eater cloud formations and hungry fires; there's a lovely shot near the end of the students and staff with their wands over their heads, tips glowing, in memorium for their terrible losses. 

The cast, while recognizing the increasingly dark sides of their characters, is able to keep the mood bearable.  The only major addition for Half-Blood Prince is Jim Broadbent, who does a marvelous turn as the vain, secretly shamed Professor Slughorn.   This chapter was Michael Gambon's great showcase, and he leaves (more or less:  like Obi-Wan Kenobi, death doesn't entirely remove him from the saga) a great presence behind.  Daniel Radcliffe is here a legitimate leading man, capturing the heroism, determination and occasional foolhardiness of Harry; he, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint are so practiced in their scenes together (which now have a hormonal charge), they can suggest seismic shifts in their relationships with a shifted shoulder or a glance.  Slytherin house points, too, to Tom Felton, who moves past being the school bully to show a boy trying to live up to a level of evil he'd only thought he could imagine.

Steve Kloves, perhaps reenergized by his Order of the Phoenix break, returns to the series with one of his most effective screenplays, expertly traversing the difficult tonal shifts of the material.  As usual, the struggle to keep the film down to 153 minutes requires some characters (Lavender Brown) and details (Harry and Dumbledore's hunt for the horcrux) to get disappointingly short shrift, but the narrative pushes forward commandingly.

The magically moving portraits are pulled off the walls of Hogwarts in 2007's HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, and the colors have started draining from the Potter universe.  Gone are the lush visuals of Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire; the palette of Slawomir Idziak's photography (his films include Kieslowski's great Decalogue and also Black Hawk Down) is dominated by grays, blacks and browns.  The visual message is clear:  we're not in a kiddie movie franchise anymore. 

The pastel exception to these subdued hues, of course, is the pink favored by Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), the smiling, giggling gorgon who becomes the latest Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts as a stepping stone on her way to fascist dictatorship.  Umbridge, even with her tortures significantly toned down from those in J.K. Rowling's book, is one of the author's most frightening creations, beautifully realized by Staunton.

In franchise terms, the biggest development on Order of the Phoenix was the decision to hire David Yates as house director for the remainder of the series.  Yates was hardly an obvious choice, having never directed a feature film before (his most notable credit was the BBC version of State of Play, later--and badly--remade by Hollywood); there was concern when he was named that the studio had chosen a TV hack whose main interest would be keeping on budget as he rattled through the script pages.  Yates, though, has been creative and wholehearted in embracing the darkness of the story's later chapters; Order of the Phoenix isn't as dramatically satisfying as the more epic Goblet of Fire, but it's emotionally fierce.  And despite the overall sense of desolation, Yates is able to vary the moods where needed, supplying one of the most rousing sequences in the whole series with the montage of Harry's illicit Order of the Phoenix training sessions (helped tremendously by the excellent Nicholas Hooper score--he had worked frequently with Yates in TV). 

Order of the Phoenix is also notable as the only Potter film not written for the screen by Steve Kloves (he pleaded exhaustion after 4 giant films in a row, but returned for the final 3 chapters).  Michael Goldenberg handles the script instead, and the segue is just about seamless.  Goldenberg only makes one structural misstep:  by omitting the admittedly complicated backstory of the prophecy that's at the core of the Phoenix story, he makes the revelation of its contents feel somewhat anti-climactic, and that makes the huge battle scene and major death that follow seem like special effects merely for the sake of spectacle.

At this point in the saga, most of the major characters had been introduced, but in addition to Umbridge, we do get Evanna Lynch as the ineffable Luna Lovegood, and Helena Bonham Carter as the utterly insane Bellatrix Lestrange.  This is also one of the chapters where Alan Rickman gets to do more than swat students whispering in Potions class, and his angry training sessions with Daniel Radcliffe are among the best scenes in the film.  With such regulars as Dumbledore and Hagrid out of the picture for much of this story, the bulk of the dramatic heavy lifting is handled by the story's young stars, who by now are more than able to bear the burden.

Order of the Phoenix is where the Potter franchise could easily have gone wrong, with a slew of major creative changes and a drastic shift in story tone.  Instead, the series seemed stronger than ever as it started to head into its home stretch, with stability both at the boxoffice ($43M higher than the previous chapter) and in the director's chair.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1)

Pending the arrival of this week's finale, Mike Newell's 2005 HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE may be, on balance, the most satisfying of the series.  It combines first-rate moviemaking with one of J.K. Rowling's most ingeniously constructed, emotionally rich stories--capped, of course, by the unveiling of Ralph Fiennes as the finally fully alive Lord Voldemort.

Newell isn't the cinematic wizard that Alfonso Cuaron is, and visually Goblet of Fire is a bit of a step backwards from Prisoner of Azkaban.  Newell, who started his career in the 1960s, had made such fine films as Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Dance With A Stranger, but he wasn't exactly an epic adventure guy; when he tried the genre again after his Potter sojourn, the result was the sad Prince of Persia.  Roger Pratt, who had photographed Chamber of Secrets, returned behind the camera for Goblet of Fire, making for a somewhat more stagier look and more old-fashioned lighting.  In other respects, though, the picture certainly has more drive and snap than the Chris Columbus chapters, with sharp editing by Mick Audsley (who's worked often with Stephen Frears) and score by Patrick Doyle.

Newell handles the action well enough (the dragons and mer-people are extremely convincing, and the living maze quite disturbing).  He also compellingly guides viewers through the complications of the storyline--screenwriter Steve Kloves had his hands full with Goblet of Fire, which could easily have been expanded to 2 full-length films (it's too bad so much of the Quidditch World Cup and the Hagrid/Madame Maxime romance had to be lost).  It would have been easy to tangle the audience in the shifts between Twiwizard Cup action sequences, inter-student conflicts and the overriding Voldemort plot, but Newell and Kloves do a yeoman's job of steering the tale forward.  

Newell's greatest strength is with the actors.  The usual giant cast of British veterans inhabit Goblet, and they're joined by Miranda Richardson (who had starred in Dance With A Stranger), delicious as Rita Skeeter; David Tennant, briefly but scarily vicious as Barty Crouch Jr; and especially Brendan Gleeson, so good as Mad-Eye Mooney that it's too bad subsequent chapters didn't give him more to do.  (And of course there's Robert Pattinson, whose on-screen death became an omen of how successful he'd become as one of the undead.)  Goblet of Fire, though, is most notable as the movie that first showcased how polished its young stars had become.  The Yule Ball storylines allow them (especially Rupert Grint) to show off their comic chops, and Newell gives Emma Watson a lovely little Audrey Hepburn moment as she walks down the stairs at the ball and everyone else in the cast realizes how beautiful she is.  Later on, as the story takes its darker turns, Daniel Radcliffe faces down Ralph Fiennes--Amon Goeth of Schindler's List in all his sneering villainy--and proves himself a worthy adversary.

Chris Columbus' Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets were well-crafted, entertaining movies, but Alfonso Cuaron's 2004 HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN was the first real Potter film.

It's also the least successful financially (if you think $795M worldwide is something to complain about).  This may be because it's burdened by the most insubstantial J.K. Rowling plot:  it's the only film in which no incarnation of Voldemort even makes an appearance, and really, now that we know the entire story, did we need an entire movie devoted to Sirius Black?  Not only that, but the entire last half-hour is devoted to a time travel trope that requires the previous half-hour to be repeated in full, and becomes more annoying the more you think about it--not because it hasn't been painstakingly worked out by Rowling, screenwriter Steve Kloves and Cuaron, but because the existence of time travel in the Potter universe unavoidably makes you wonder why it never comes up again in so many more crucial points of the saga.

And yet, Prisoner of Azkaban is a triumphant piece of filmmaking.  When Columbus decided that two back-to-back mega-productions were enough and stepped down, the choice of Cuaron to replace him was admirably daring.  Cuaron had previously made the critically praised but commercially unimpressive A Little Princess and a failed update of Great Expectations, and while his brilliant Y Tu Mama Tambien had been a notable art-house success, it was an NC-17 sexually explicit film.  Not the obvious choice to take over a billion dollar family film franchise.

Warners and producer David Heyman took the chance, and Cuaron is simply in another league from Columbus, able to mix a lived-in naturalism with lyrically surreal touches.  Just the first few minutes of the movie--Harry making his way, suitcase in tow, through the streets of the Dursleys' suddenly realistic town, with Uncle Vernon's inflated sister orbiting far above in mid air; the crazy magical double-decker bus ride through London that culminates in the gag of innkeeper Tom (Jim Tavare) turning off his car alarm--have more wit and visual imagination than anything in the first two films combined.

Cuaron's touch improved everything.  Radcliffe, Grint and Watson, by now settled into their roles, give more relaxed, believable performances (they also get to dress like actual teenagers). Radcliffe, in particular, has several long scenes with Gary Oldman as Sirius and David Thewlis as Lupin, neither of them a slouch, and he holds his own with both of them.  Even though Stuart Craig had been the production designer all along, suddenly Hogwarts looks like a place that actually exists and is inhabited (on a smaller scale, compare the interiors of the Leaky Cauldron in this film with the generic inns of the Columbus films), a process aided by Michael Seresin's lovely photography.  Michael Gambon is deftly integrated into the role of Dumbledore, replacing the late Richard Harris.  Buckbeak is a far more accomplished digital creation than those in the previous films (although the CG werewolf later on is less successful).  The pace (editing this time by Steven Weisberg) is much faster; Prisoner of Azkaban is 15-20 minutes shorter than the previous films.  Even John Williams' score has a snazzier, less bombastic feel.

With Prisoner of Azkaban, it became clear that Warners was committed not to just keep churning out chapters of the Harry Potter franchise, but to deepen the series and develop the quality of each successive film.  When you think about the number of giant franchises that have stumbled badly with their third installments (Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Superman, Shrek and X-Men, to name just a few), this was a heartening decision, and one that's paid off as the series has continued.

Everything is a little smoother in 2002's HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS.  The young actors give more assured performances; Steve Kloves' script, having gotten so much exposition out of its way in Sorcerer's Stone, is faster and more character-based; the camerawork (by Roger Pratt instead of John Seale) is more fluid; the sets by Stuart Craig more believable; the editing (by Peter Honess instead of Richard Francis Bruce) more even.  Chris Columbus' direction is still staid, compared with the films that were to come, but it has an easier, more confident feel.

Chamber of Secrets benefits from a stronger core plot from J.K. Rowling's novel than Sorcerer's Stone had--indeed, it's too bad that in order to keep the film to a manageable 161-minute length (it's still the longest of the series), so much detail about Tom Riddle's vicious diary and its possession of Ginny Weasley had to be sacrificed.  (One wonders if the filmmakers knew at the time how critical a place Ginny would come to play in the overall saga and if that might have changed the balance of the script.)  It introduces such important characters as Moaning Myrtle (wonderfully played by Shirley Henderson), the house-elf Dobby (voiced by Toby Jones) and Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs), as well as Gilderoy Lockhart, who turned out to be relatively incidental to the series but is great fun as played by Kenneth Branagh. The story also starts to introduce the darker emotional notes that would come to dominate later chapters.

One of the side pleasures of watching the Potter movies together is the education it provides in how special effects have improved in the past decade.  Even though Chamber of Secrets came only a year after Sorcerer's Stone, the CG animation of Dobby is far better than the troll had been in the previous film, and the Quidditch match is less cartoony and more exciting.  The actors also do a better a job of integrating their actions with the effects.

Chamber of Secrets, however upgraded, is still superior as a film only to Sorcerer's Stone in the Potter canon.  Columbus, for all his improvement the second time around, continued to be an unexceptional director who couldn't accomplish much more cinematically than a professional job of storytelling.  The actors, too, were still working at inhabiting their characters:  Grint grimaces slack-jawed too much to indicate surprise and fear, and there's not much differentiation between Tom Felton's sneers as Draco Malfoy.  

With Chamber of Secrets, he Harry Potter series was moving in the right direction, trying to improve despite its great success, but not even the most optimistic viewer would have imagined just how much Warners was willing to allow the franchise to be reimagined going forward.  The great leap in the series was still to come.

Whatever one can say about Chris Columbus--and there'll be plenty of less than glowing words about him below--he's the man who cast Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as the leads in 2001's HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE, and for that Warners should name a building after him.  The three grew over 10 years into plausible physical embodiments of their characters (the studio probably would have liked Radcliffe a little taller, but it hasn't hurt the character; and Watson is really more beautiful than Hermione is meant to be, which in Hollywood is called "casting"), but it was more than that.  In a decade notable for scandals involving one young star after another, they've all remained impossibly professional--when Radcliffe disclosed last week that he'd had a drinking problem during some of the latter years, it seemed to come as much of a surprise to the UK press as to everyone else.  

Oh, and they could act--in fact, they've proven themselves able to evolve and deepen their performances as each successive chapter required more of them. Even more remarkably, it wasn't just the stars who had that capability, but the young supporting actors too--even Bonnie Wright, who as Ginny Weasley has maybe 30 total seconds on screen to start.  In Sorcerer's Stone, the first and weakest of the series, the stars are appealing but show only hints of their potential.  Columbus has them all giving fairly typical child performances for the most part, with too many broad double-takes and expressions of awe mixed with astonishment; occasionally, though, we see the steely resolve and crack comic timing they'd all develop as the films progressed. 

Columbus (along with producer David Heyman and Warners itself, of course) made other good decisions.  No expense was spared on the superb cast of adults:  Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Alan Rickman, John Cleese, Richard Griffiths, Julie Walters, Fiona Show, and Robbie Coltrane were just some of the great actors who caught the train to Hogwarts.  Steve Kloves, whose previous work, however good, hadn't touched the fantasy genre (Racing With the Moon, The Fabulous Baker Boys) became the workhorse of the series, writing all but one of the scripts that had to pare down J.K. Rowling's enormous, intricate stories to feature length. The production was first-class in every respect, even if the special effects from 2001, particularly the Troll and the somewhat embarrassing Quidditch game, look awfully dated today.  (The baby dragon looks good, though.)

Sorcerer's Stone is quite entertaining, an extraordinary universe capably presented; there's just not anything special about it as a film.  Columbus has cinematographer John Seale shoot Stuart Craig's enormous sets without any personality, using long pans and tracking shots that seem designed only to show off the scale of the production.  Columbus bungles the opening sequences with the Dursleys, playing them for comedy without any of the dark undercurrents Rowling brings to those scenes, and thus flattening some of Harry's emotions that follow.  Because this is the first of the series, there's a huge amount of exposition that has to be explained--Diagon Alley!  Gringott's!  Muggles!  Hogwarts!  Voldemort!  Dumbledore!  Snape!  Quidditch!--and the plot itself, Voldemort trying to use the Stone so he can come back to life, doesn't really kick in until the second half of the movie.  While the picture is never boring, Columbus often coasts from sequence to sequence with indifferent pacing.  Some of the storytelling is surprisingly clumsy, with important plot developments turning on Hagrid blurting things out and then saying "I shouldn't have told you that," Hermione forgetting that she's had the book they've all been searching for all along, and the unlikely "detention" that consists of sending the kids to wander alone through the Dark Forest late at night. 

Sorcerer's Stone provides a decent foundation for the rest of the series, and to the credit of everyone involved, despite its massive success, there was a commitment to improve the franchise going forward.  Watching it now, it's best thought of as the picture you have to get through to get to the good ones.

HARRY POTTER RETROSPECTIVE REVIEWS
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban