Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was a really well-done movie off of the first book in the series. So it would come as no surprise that the 2002 sequel, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” would be just as good. Chris Columbus did just as good of a job, maybe even better, on this one. Since the next book told the next story and expanded on the history of Hogwarts, Columbus made sure to keep that all in so the viewers that never read any of the books would know. All of the same actors returned, but we get a couple of new faces in this movie.

In the beginning, we get a house-elf named Dobby, voiced by Toby Jones, who is warning Harry that he must not return to Hogwarts because of a great evil. Now if you were in Harry’s shoes, would you listen? Harry obviously didn’t because he needed to escape and called Hogwarts his home. If he didn’t return, then he would have to put up with the same caged feeling he had to go through before he enrolled in Hogwarts. Even with Dobby putting obstacles in his path like dumping the cake on his uncle’s friend, sealing the gate to the Hogwarts Express train, making the rouge Bludger in the Quidditch game, he still stays at Hogwarts. We all know that Dobby was only trying to protect Harry from the new danger that was haunting Hogwarts, but Harry always stood up to the new challenge.

We also meet Ron’s parents, Arthur and Molly Weasley, played by Mark Williams and Julie Walters. We only briefly saw Walters in the first movie, but she is expanded here. Arthur shows how fascinated he is with Muggles (non-magic people) and when he isn’t strict with his children, Molly has to be the one to snap him to his strict side. Molly of course is showing the strictness because of being worried for her kids safety in breaking the Decree of showing magic in front of Muggles, but she doesn’t count Harry because he is the innocent bystander.

Every year there is a new professor for Defense against the Dark Arts, and this year we get the self-absorbed narcissistic brut, Gilderoy Lockhart, played by Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh. Radcliffe actually admitted that whenever he had a question regarding Shakespeare, he would go to Branagh since he had acted in a number of different modern-day adaptations of Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet, Henry V, Othello, and Much Ado About Nothing. Lockhart is just so full of himself that you would hate going to his class because he doesn’t know anything and is only there to go on about his fame. Professor Sprout, played by Miriam Margolyes, is seen in this one briefly when she is giving a Herbology lesson. After seeing that lesson, you would want to take that class because of the lesson about Mandrakes. I will also like to say this was sadly the last role Richard Harris did since he had passed away shortly after the movie was made. He was luckily able to finish working on the movie before he passed, but they would have to find a new actor to play Dumbledore.

Now we finally get to meet Draco’s father, Lucius Malfoy, played by Jason Isaacs. Because Lucius likes to belittle people and treats them like they are ants that he can just step on, we get where Draco gets that from. You just want to go up to the guy and punch him dead in his jaw and say to him, “Hey, not everyone is like you! Leave them alone you jerk!”

Believe me when I say that this film gets darker and scarier than the first one. When you see Harry speak Parseltoungue (snake language), you think that he is possessed by another being. Or how about when Harry and Ron are in the Forbidden Forest and they meet Aragog, voiced by Julian Glover, and his spiders? Those who have arachnophobia would be scared, like a friend of mine was and even Ron. There is even a duel with a dragon in this movie, and if you are afraid of snakes, then don’t watch this because there are a few snake scenes in this one.

Even Roger Ebert said, “What's developing here, it's clear, is one of the most important 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 as "Star Wars," but filled with more wit and humanity.” He’s right though because we learn the history of Hogwarts. My 20-year-old cousin said this was the worst when he was 8, I believe, because it was too historical. In my opinion, he may not like history, but this was what made the book so great.

Stuart Craig returns as Production Designer, and boy did he deliver in this one. Like I had stated yesterday, there may be computer graphics used in this one, but they look so realistic that you don’t worry about it and instead look at the beautiful design of the movie. You just love the visual effects, and Judianna Makovsky and Lindy Hemming handled the costumes in this one.

Overall, Columbus really treated this one with care and did an amazing job with bringing the book to life. Like all novel adaptations, the novel is always going to be better because the novel just sucks you in to the detail they go into. The movie can’t fit that all in, or else you’ll be sitting in the theater for five hours, and you will get bored. Unless they start doing intermissions and you can take breaks, but still, it would be too much. So if you loved the first one, then definitely check this one out. It has great action sequences, especially at the end in the Chamber of Secrets, although they could have worked on Salazar Slytherin’s face more. He looked more like Zeus.

With the first two films in the Harry Potter series making a great start and promising the other sequels to be great, how will the third one be? At the time, everyone who read Harry Potter said the third book was their favorite, although I wasn’t one of them. Find out tomorrow when I continue my Harry Potter-a-thon.