Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

After several aborted attempts, I finally got to see the third installment of the Harry Potter series on Saturday. The third book is my favorite of the five so far, so this has been a long-anticipated event for me and my feelings are mixed. On one hand I am irritated that so much was changed in the adaptation of the book for the screen. Having read the books so many times I noticed all the additions, subtractions, and shifts a lot more than others probably did. But visually the film has improved by a magnitude over the first two. It was stunning and a significant break with the clearly fake look of the past, and yet it still kept up a common thread so as not to jar too much.

My favorite change, and one that I think makes a huge difference for realism, is the writing done for the teenagers. In the books Rowling wrote the students as perfect little people, with uncommon wit and manners. The script for Azkaban the film gives them a more realistic attitude and speech patterns more appropriate to their ages—they are 13 in this installment.