Member review

I have nostalgic memories of the Harry Potter series. I know J. K. Rowling is a transphobe and all, but I still like it. The movies I mean, I haven't read the books in a while. But I still find entertainment in seeing The Philosephers Stone - though to some it may be called the SORCERERS Stone.

Upon my rewatch on the first film, I feel that the Dursleys should've been focused on more. I know Harry is the main character, and the place to be is Hogglewarts (Hogwarts!) but shouldn't Harry get days off school? From what Google tells me, boarding schools, like Higglewarts (Hogwarts!), usually do allow days off. And a not so small amount of Harry Potter is set in Christmas. So why not approach the subject around the winter break?

On Headgewarts (Hogwarts, I've told you three times! And I’ve not listened to you three times), I find the ever-changing staircases that the students have to navigate an odd choice for the architect to install. There isn't even a time table for them, so if you are 30 seconds late for the stairs you could expect to be anywhere from 3 minutes to 90 minutes late to class.

I also feel that there were some CGI scenes that haven't exactly aged the best, most of these scenes with bad CGI feature children in quite dangerous circumstances - Neville Longbottom notably falls from a high place - that would be awkward to do practically. There's a scene with a centaur that is another notable scene with this terribly aged CGI, I feel as though they should've filmed Harry talking to a guy on stilts and animated horse legs over them.

Now, despite what many may assume, Rowling didn't actually do anything new conceptually with Harry Potter. The idea of someone attending magic school has existed for quite a while, though I can't tell when, and has been used in pretty popular stories - notably Earthsea, Worst Witch and Discworld (of Witch I am quite interested in) - and the name for Hogwarts (Finally! Oh, sorry about that, I'll correct it right away) and the name for Hogbrainwarts comes from the movie Labyrinth, it is one of the names Hoggle is called - though he always responds with "It's Hoggle!!!!!" So he's pretty livid about it - as per the rule of 3, my final example is the giant spider in the sequel, which is a reference to LOTR. It's name, Aragog, being eerily similar to Aragon.

Now, this doesn't mean you can rip off Harry Potter wholesale, though inspiration is allowed. It just means that you don't have to be entirely original to be good. It's the execution that matters just as much. Though a little originality is good too.

Ultimately, it wasn't the idea that sold Harry Potter to 600,000,000 people worldwide. It was the books power to enthral us into the world that J. K. Rowling patched together with the threads of her own imagination. And it was the imagination of all who worked on the Harry Potter movies.