The Prisoner of Azkaban

Like with the last post, intuition should tell me to love this movie, that this is one of the best Harry Potter films, that this was directed by auteur Alfonso Cuaron and that this film is atmospheric and dark, unfortunately i don't feel like this, i don't particularly like this movie, much as i didn't particulraly love the book it was based on, and i find this film to be utterly unlinked to the rest of the series.

Despite my qualms about this film, this movie was one of the most influential of the franchise, the film guided the direction of all subsequent Harry Potter films, making them dark, more cinematic and more character driven. The director made many changes to the environment and atmosphere of Hogwarts, rather than the school being a series of disparate locations filmed at some to the most iconic british tourist attractions, CGI was used in order to link these locations together, making the universe of Hogwarts a real lived in environment. Locations were also widened, enlarged or enhanced in function of what the story needs,  creating a real floorplan for the school, a floorplan that will be changed as needed, given Hogwarts magical secrets.

Changes were also made to the characterizations of the students, the pupils were removed from the voluminous capes which hid their personalities and were put into more casual wear, they were encouraged to personalize their uniforms much as real students do. Because of all these things the film has a far larger sense of personality and the school feels far more diverse as a result.The film takes on a darker tone from it's predecessors, there is a continuous sense of impending doom and we can sense that something is brewing, the film has an influence over the rest of the series, and is responsible for starting a visual narrative that will be continued throughout the franchise.

Whilst the storytelling and visual world are both complex, unfortunately the entire film is a little disconnected, Voldemort doesn't appear in this series, and nothing we really learn about in this story is relevent to the rest of the series, few new characters are introduced, no one dies, and the whole of the climax is about saving a hippogrif that is about to be executed. Of course, i have these same qualms about the book, and i find the story too disjointed and simplistic to care about it.

Despite the flaws of it's plot, Cuaron does a fantastic job of crafting a complex visual story from the least interesting of the Potter novels, and although i feel that this film by itself is only mediocre, it's influence on the rest of the series and the way in which it sets up such a complex world for the stories to inhabit cannot be understated. Rating: B-