The Best Harry Potter Movie (and Book)

Anyone around my age has plenty of childhood memories that involve Harry Potter, both the books and the movies. Unless you were there, it’s hard to imagine the lines at Borders and how quickly the books flew off the pallets—not shelves, pallets. The bookstores would stack J.K. Rowling’s latest release in giant piles on pallets in the middle of the sales floor because they needed so many and they sold so quickly. When the films were released, movie theaters were packed for weeks, and even though the first movies debuted in November, they remained in theaters until after the new year. The cultural phenomenon cannot be overstated.

Now, more than twenty years after the premiere of Sorcerer’s Stone and fifteen years after Deathly Hallows hit bookshelves, there is still a debate over which book and which movie are the best. After hearing many different arguments and opinions, I can safely say that you are all wrong, because the best book and movie are Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. No, this is not satire, no this is not rage bait, unless you’re a grown adult whose taste in literature has never matured beyond children’s books, in which case this is rage bait and the joke is on you.

Daniel Radcliff as Harry Potter enters the Chamber of Secrets. (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, dir. Chris Columbus, 2002). Do you think digital effects could ever hit with the same spine-tingling gut punch that this physical set delivers?

Before I begin discussing the obvious superiority of the book and especially the film, let me begin by explaining why complaints about the film are all fake news.

1. The acting is bad: It’s not, the young actors deliver better performances than they do in the first movie, which is more beloved than the second, and they definitely perform better than in the later movies where they do little more than look angry for two hours and some change.

2. It’s too long: This one I can understand a bit more. It is the longest of the movies, but this was also what the young audiences called for. Children in test audiences for Sorcerer’s Stone wished that the 152-minute film was longer, and given that the first hour of the series’ inaugural installment is exposition before Harry arrives at Hogwarts, the second film needed to spend more time with the beloved characters at the wizarding school. This is exactly what the movie does, but without that initial hour of exposition, the time at Hogwarts might feel a little long. With that said, both books on which the films are based are very close to the same length and both movies make similar, minimal edits to their source material.

   
   

I’ll come back to the film in a moment, but before I do, allow me to explain why the book Chamber of Secrets is the best in the written series. I will use the process of elimination.

Order of the Phoenix: Too long and meandering. At the end of the previous book, Voldemort comes back from the dead and then the majority of the following installment is Harry and the gang dealing with a mean teacher at Hogwarts. The looming threat of Voldemort feels secondary and almost forgotten at parts, and the subplot of Dumbledore completely avoiding Harry is annoying. Dumbledore shouldn’t be acting less mature than his fifteen-year-old protégé, and if the concern was that Voldemort could read his mind through Harry’s eyes simply by making eye contact, a conversation without eye contact seems like a pretty simple solution. Let me also just say, while I’m thinking about it, that I pronounce the T in Voldemort’s name because he’s English, the book is written in English, I read it in English, and in the English-language movies, they pronounce the T. A lot of bookish folks on YouTube drop the T to obey J.K. Rowling’s pronunciation requests.

Half-Blood Prince: too long, too repetitive, too many flashbacks. Half of the story is Harry falling into pensieves to learn minute details about Voldemort’s childhood and family. Harry also becomes very obsessive over Malfoy in this book, stalking him and accusing him of crimes, and he’s annoyingly always right when he has no reason to even suspect Draco in the first place. I always thought a better ending to this book would have been if Harry was wrong about everything, Draco was completely innocent, and Harry gets admitted to St. Mungo’s for his irrational paranoia. Book seven opens with Harry in the loony bin, not fully healed, but the Order has to break him out because everything else still happened (Death Eaters in Hogwarts, Dumbledore murdered, Snape as the new headmaster) and they need him to hunt horcruxes to defeat Voldemort.

Deathly Hallows: Too long and too much unnecessary drama between the friends—the whole subplot of Ron leaving was clearly inserted to stretch the length of the book. Not to mention the detail of the locket horcrux making whoever wears it irritable and angry feels far too derivative of The Lord of the Rings. Also Harry gets too talkative and explainy in his final confrontation with Voldemort. The reader already knows why the Elder Wand is rejecting him. Just kill him already. Another side note: I think the book would have been more interesting if Harry had to kill Voldemort with the killing curse. That would have been an interesting subplot—Harry learning to cast the spell that was used against his parents and against him as a baby (unsuccessfully, of course).

Goblet of Fire: It’s controversial to say this, but this one is also too long and is filled with too many plot holes. The insane success of Prisoner of Azkaban is what allowed J.K. Rowling’s next installment to be so long. A 700-page children’s book would typically never have a successful commercial strategy, but since the sales were expected well before its release, Rowling essentially had carte blanche as far as the length was concerned. With that said, this book is still too long. The Triwizard tournament is exciting, but too much happens between the tasks. The Yule ball can probably go, or at least be edited down quite a bit. The introduction of pensieves was just a way to make flashbacks more showy than telly (regarding the age-old mantra of “show, don’t tell”), but it doesn’t make them any less of flashbacks or any less irrelevant to the plot. And the entire plan was really for Harry to get through all of the tasks just so he could touch a cup that was a portkey? There was really no easier way to get him to touch a portkey?

Prisoner of Azkaban: A very enjoyable book that I think is right in the Goldilocks zone of appeasing the readers with more material without being overly long (like the last four books in the series). However, the two full chapters of dense exposition at the end when Sirius and Remus figure out who really betrayed Harry’s parents really derail the momentum the book builds. The movie improves on this by taking most of that conversation off-camera and the two characters explaining the gist of it to the three young wizards in bullet-point fashion.

Sorcerer’s Stone: A solid start to the series, but heavy with exposition in the first third of the book (which is understandable because there’s a lot about the Wizarding World that needs explaining) and it makes rereads tiresome.

With every other book in the series appropriately disparaged, now let me discuss what makes Chamber of Secrets stand out.

After an amazing introduction to Harry and Hogwarts in the first novel, the reader is brought back to Harry’s world and can jump right into the magical adventure without the need for lengthy exposition. And what a beginning! Harry has been promoted from the broom closet to the spare bedroom in the Dursleys, and when they put bars on his window as punishment, the Weasley brothers show up in a flying car to break him out.

What’s also great about the story in Chamber of Secrets is the way that Hogwarts, a fantastic setting in books and brought to life in incredible fashion in the films directed by Chris Columbus, really comes alive and becomes three-dimensional. Several of the other storylines in the series involve something malignant outside trying to break into the school in order to get at Harry (books 3, 4, 5, and 6), but Chamber is about the school coming alive. Hogwarts is over a thousand years old and is filled with mystery, wonder, and legends. Chamber combines the revival of one of these legends with the fear of the monster within the hero himself. For much of the book, most of the students at Hogwarts think that Harry truly is the Heir of Slytherin, including Harry himself who wonders if the Sorting Hat made a mistake by placing him in Gryffindor. The emergence of the attacks at the school along with the mysterious ancient legend of the Chamber of Secrets brings the setting of Hogwarts to life and makes it three-dimensional in a way that few other novels have been able to achieve with their settings (House of Leaves comes to mind).

Chamber of Secrets isn’t just a creepy, exciting story. J.K. Rowling knows her classics and she intentionally made the monster a giant serpent (not only the emblem of Slytherin House but also the age-old symbol of evil) housed by the villain in a hidden dungeon far beneath the castle. These types of final confrontations between heroes, villains, and their monsters date back to ancient Greece, and stories that execute these scenes well create in effect religious experiences for their audiences that get to the heart of Jungian psychology, about the true, dark, inner self hidden deep within the psyche, in the subconscious far beneath where anyone could accidentally stumble upon them.

And this is exactly the plot of Chamber of Secrets. Harry must go deep beneath the school to Voldemort’s hidden lair to slay the beast, save the girl, and destroy the horcrux (though he doesn’t know at the time what Tom Riddle’s diary is, he just knows that it must be destroyed). And what is Harry himself but another horcrux, though, again, he doesn’t know this himself at the time of the confrontation in the Chamber. This means that while Harry is confronting Voldemort, he himself has a piece of Voldemort within him, completing the plot of the novel as the archetypal story of the hero going deep into his own psyche to find the monster within himself.

And the set design is fantastic. The Chamber of Secrets was the largest set ever built for the Harry Potter films, and was altered from the description in the book (which included a fifty-foot-tall statue of Salazar Slytherin) to better fit the aspect ratio of film. Later installments in the film series relied too heavily on digital effects in creating their sets, but the earlier films had to use more practical effects, which helped flesh out Hogwarts and the other locations in the Wizarding World that Harry visits.

What makes Chamber of Secrets so strong, and the best in both the film and book series, is its story. It’s the only installment that brings plot, themes, myth, and character psychology together into a descent narrative that speaks to the core human fear of the monster within ourselves—a fear that has been inspiring stories since the days of Homer and the oral tradition. If you haven’t seen it in a while, perhaps since it was in theaters, it’s definitely worth watching again, not for childhood nostalgia or as a preparation for the new HBO series, but to appreciate the craftsmanship of its narrative, its cinematography, and its spectacle, which far outperform the later installments in the series.