Review of Harry Potter Chamber of Secrets Extended Edition
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Harry Potter And The Sleeping room Of Secrets
The start movie was the setup, and this 1 is the payoff. "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" leaves all of the explanations of wizardry behind and plunges rapidly into an take chances that's darker and scarier than anything in the showtime Harry Potter picture. It's also richer: The second in a planned series of seven Potter films is brimming with invention and new ideas, and its Hogwarts Schoolhouse seems to expand and deepen earlier our very eyes into a world big enough to muffle unguessable secrets.
What's developing here, it's articulate, is ane of the almost of import franchises in movie history, a series of films that consolidate all of the advances in computer-aided animation, linked to the extraordinary creative work of J.K. Rowling, who has created a mythological world as grand every bit "Star Wars," but filled with more wit and humanity. Although the young wizard Harry Potter is nominally the hero, the motion-picture show remembers the gilded age of moviemaking, when vivid supporting characters crowded the canvas. The story is most personalities, personal histories and eccentricity, not about a superstar superman crushing the narrative with his egotistical weight.
In the new movie, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe, a little taller and deeper-voiced) returns with his friends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson, in the early on stages of babehood). They sometimes seem to stand lone amongst the alarming mysteries of Hogwarts, where even the teachers, even the baronial headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris), even the learned professors Snape (Alan Rickman) and McGonagall (Maggie Smith), fifty-fifty the stalwart Hagrid the Giant (Robbie Coltrane) seem mystified and a little frightened by the schoolhouse's dread secrets.
Is at that place indeed a Chamber of Secrets subconscious somewhere in the vast pile of Hogwarts? Can it merely be opened by a descendent of Salazar Slytherin, the more sinister of the school's co-founders? Does it contain a monster? Has the monster already escaped, and is it responsible for paralyzing some of the students, whose petrified bodies are constitute in the corridors, and whose bodies are carried to the infirmary even so frozen in a moment of time? Exercise the answers to these questions originate in events many years agone, when even the ancient Dumbledore was (marginally) younger? And does a diary by a former student named Tom Marvolo Riddle--a book with nothing written in it, but whose pages reply questions in a ghostly handwriting--provide the clues that Harry and his friends demand? (Answer to all of the higher up: Probably.) This puzzle could exist solved in a drab and routine movie with characters wandering down former stone corridors, but one of the pleasures of Chris Columbus' direction of "Harry Potter and the Bedroom of Secrets" is how visually live it is. This is a movie that answers any objection to computer blitheness with glorious or creepy sights that blend convincingly with the activeness. Hogwarts itself seems to have grown since the start movie, from a largish sort of country business firm into a thing of spires and turrets, vast rooms and endlessly convoluted passageways, lecture halls and science labs, with as much hidden below the ground equally visible above it. Even the Quiddich game is held in a larger stadium (mayhap rich alumni were generous?). There are times, indeed, when the scope of Hogwarts seems to arroyo that of Gormenghast, the limitless edifice in the trilogy past Mervyn Peake that was mayhap ane of Rowling'south inspirations.
The production designer is Stuart Craig, returning from "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." He has created (there is no other way to put it) a globe here, a fully realized world with all the details crowded in, so that even the corners of the screen are intriguing. This is i of the rare contempo movies y'all could happily sentry with the sound turned off, but for the joy of his sets, the costumes by Judianna Makovsky and Lindy Hemming, and the visual effects (the Quiddich friction match seems even more than 3-dimensional, the characters swooping beyond the vast field, as Harry finds himself seriously threatened past the odious Malfoy).
At that place are iii new characters this time, one delightful, i complacent, one malevolent. Professor Sprout (Miriam Margolyes) is on the biology kinesthesia, and teaches a class on the peculiar properties of the mandrake plant, made all the most agreeable by students of John Donne who are familiar with the boosted symbolism of the mandrake only hinted at in grade. The more than you know about mandrakes, the funnier Sprout'southward grade is.
She is the delightful addition. The conceited new kinesthesia fellow member, deliciously bandage, is Gilderoy Lockhart (Kenneth Branagh), author of the autobiography Magical Me, who thinks of himself as a consummate wizard merely whose spell to heal Harry'due south broken arm has unfortunate results. And then at that place is Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs), father of the supercilious Draco, who skulks about every bit if he should be hated just on general principles.
These characters and plot elements draw together in late action sequences of 18-carat power, which may be too intense for younger viewers. In that location is a nearly alarming confrontation with spiders and a scary tardily duel with a dragon, and these are handled not as jolly family movie episodes, but with the excitement of a mainstream thriller. While I am normally in despair when a picture abandons its plot for a 3rd deed given over entirely to action, I have no problem with the manner "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" ends, because it has been pointing toward this ending, hinting nigh it, preparing us for it, all the way through. What a glorious moving-picture show.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
161 minutes
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