As the muggle/no-maj world braces itself for the arrival of the second part of Warner Bros’ Fantastic Beasts Saga, The Crimes of Grindelwald, Greg D Smith takes a retrospective look at the whole cinematic franchise set in the magical world created by J K Rowling, starting appropriately enough at the beginning with 2001’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (which we’ll refer to in this series by its UK title, rather than The Sorcerer’s Stone). With four greatly successful novels having received tremendous praise from readers young and old, could director Chris Columbus translate the magic from the page to the screen? And would the three unknown leads have what it took to bring these beloved characters to life?

Eleven year old orphan Harry is about to discover that everything he thought he knew about his life was wrong. Invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry, Harry will discover that in the wizarding world, he is something of a legend. But even fame and fortune may not help him overcome the dangers that lie ahead…

Harry Potter is one of those pop culture phenomena that somehow feel as if they have always existed, as if there was never a point at which they were not among us. Yet at twenty-one years old, the first novel in J K Rowling’s phenomenally successful debut series is a mere stripling in the genre. At seventeen years old, this film is similarly youthful, and yet so very much has changed both in the genre and the wider art of film-making in that intervening not-quite-two-decades that younger movies than this have aged terribly badly when viewed through a contemporary lens. Whether it’s early efforts at CGI, tropes in writing which have thankfully died away in the modern age or simply references which don’t hold up over time, genre films especially have a tendency to age poorly. Is this the case with the debut onscreen adventure of the Boy Who Lived? Well, yes and no.

Visually, the film can’t help but have aged in some areas. Some didn’t look quite right at the time and have only got worse with age – the various shots of dangerous stuff on broomsticks including portions of the Quidditch match (interestingly one of the only extended Quidditch sequences in the series) looked artificial then and look plain weird now. Firenze the Centaur, Voldemort and a bunch of flying keys all look a little ropey by modern standards as well. We aren’t talking Batman and Robin scaling the side of a building by way of the camera being turned on its side or the crew of the S.S.R.N Seaview flailing wildly across a static set levels, but where the film pushes itself in the CGI department, creaks are starting to show.

However, balancing that out is an awful lot of good old-fashioned practical effects. Simple visual camera tricks used to make Robbie Coltrane look as enormous as his character Hagrid requires, cutaways to get the effect of exploding magic going wrong and the use of trained animals all help to keep the movie looking as ‘real’ as possible.

Adding to that effect is a canny avoidance of pop-culture references of any kind. This is a carry-over from the source material – Rowling studiously avoids real-world references beyond the bare minimum to ground the series as happening in the real world, but brand names, celebrities and technology are all quietly avoided, helping to create a sense of timelessness that means the film stands up as well today as it did seventeen years ago.

Helping that sense of timelessness is Columbus’ distinctive visual style. Specifically aiming to make the muggle scenes ‘bleak and dreary’, contrasted with shots of the wizarding world to be ‘steeped in colour, mood and detail’, the effect is to give a story universally understandable from a purely visual standpoint. Harry’s world is awful when we first meet him, living in a cupboard under the stairs in a house on an estate the type of which any UK resident will instantly find familiar.  There’s a dullness that permeates the visuals, from the outfits worn by the Dursleys themselves to the decoration of their little slice of suburbia. Even when they flee to somewhere ‘far away’ to escape the incessant letters from Hogwarts which Vernon refuses to let Harry open, it’s to a lonely tower on the coast in the middle of nowhere, spartan and dark.

The contrast from the first second Harry enters the world of wizardry and witchcraft could hardly be more pronounced. The carnival atmosphere of Diagon Alley (which is reached by the middle ground of The Leaky Cauldron, a dark, shabby pub in the muggle world which is disguising itself), the bright colours of the coats of arms for each of the houses at Hogwarts, the flamboyant dress of the teachers – all is calculated to tell the clear visual tale of a boy going from a world of grey routine to one of wild, untrammelled excitement and adventure.

Columbus (and the studio) resist the urge to ‘Hollywood-ise’ the world Rowling created. Rowling’s insistence that the movie feature a British cast led to the oft-repeated joke that any British actor of any note has appeared at some point in a Harry Potter film, and certainly it’s a cast that features some luminaries of the UK stage and screen. But all eyes at the time were not on icons like Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Richard Harris and David Bradley – rather the lion’s share of the attention on the movie centred on its young leads.

It’s impossible to escape the fact that all three were inexperienced and incredibly young at the time of filming. Radcliffe had the most experience, sharing the title role in David Copperfield for the BBC and appearing in The Tailor of Panama on the big screen. Watson and Grint were completely fresh, and what’s impressive about that is how strong their performances are. Grint gets the majority of the funny lines, but his ability to cast a mournful look or carp for the camera as needed elevates the part from simple comic relief to genuinely engaging character. Watson, full of confidence is a perfect Hermione, treading the thin line between upper middle class swot and rebellious young woman pitch perfectly – one of the most oft-quote exchanges involves Ron declaring Hermione needs to sort her priorities out after she tells them she’s off to bed before either of them comes up with another clever idea to get them killed, or worse expelled. That single pair of lines is the single perfect illustration of why both characters work so well with these actors playing them. Watson’s declaration arch, acid but with just a hint of playfulness, Grint’s rejoinder to Harry equal parts scornful and slightly in awe. Rowling may be regretting pairing these two off in hindsight, but it’s clear Columbus was on board.

Radcliffe bears a huge weight and he does so with no little amount of determination, although talent is in shorter supply for him here. It’s arguable that what a film following the adventures of three young kids needs is less polished performers who give a better sense of being actual kids, and certainly that’s a tick in the plus column for Radcliffe’s performance here. Harry’s sense of earnestness, his bewilderment at the whole larger world into which he’s introduced, and his need to have everything explained to him by other characters are all well-served by the less refined nature of Radcliffe’s delivery, and help endear the character to the audience.

Where the film does especially well is in misleading its audience in the same way as the source novel. Upon a first viewing, if (like me) you had not read the novels at all, it was perfectly possible for you to miss the copious hints as to the true villain of the piece and invest all your suspicion in Rickman’s excellent portrayal of the sneering Professor Snape. At the Quidditch match on a first viewing, it’s really compelling that Snape is the bad guy, but go back and re-watch and there’s every hint right there that it’s Quirrell who’s up to no good. The confrontation between Snape and Quirrell in the corridor at night, witnessed by an Invisibility Cloaked-Harry, takes on a whole new meaning with the benefit of hindsight, and even the actions of both when a troll is discovered in the dungeon are wholly different when you watch them again knowing how it all turns out. Columbus – an experienced director of children’s movies – knows exactly how to play fair with his audience. The movie never patronises, never leaves any clue in signposted plain sight, but they are there, and they are easy enough to see on a second viewing once you know. Even Quirrell’s original meeting with Harry yields the first clue to his true nature, as he refuses to shake Harry’s hand.

As far as the adventure goes, Columbus does a nice job of balancing the more fantastical elements of the school with the more mundane realities of it being a school. We see the kids attend lessons, learn the very basics of magic, receive post and hang out in the common room. We also see them encountering baby dragons, centaurs and unicorns, running from a three-headed dog and flying on broomsticks. By pacing itself and switching in-between these two elements, the film avoids the adventuresome bits becoming stale, parsing out its action in such a way that it never loses its shone from repetition.

Even the nature of the adventure itself – when one gets down to it – is fairly small and self-contained, while simultaneously being of great import to the magical world. It boils down to a quest into a part of the school they aren’t really allowed in to recover a magic rock hidden there by their teachers and when you render it down to its core components like that it sounds rather pedestrian. But then add in the fact that the magic rock is the base ingredient for the elixir of life, which extends life by hundreds of years, and it’s guarded by magical protections including a three-headed dog, a room full of flying keys and the most violent game of chess ever, and it gets a little more exciting. Tack on that they have to recover the stone before it’s stolen by the most powerful dark wizard ever to have lived so that he can come back and start his reign of terror all over again, and factor in that that’s that same dark wizard who orphaned our hero and gave him his scar as a baby, and it takes on a whole different level of importance.

Everything about this story, and this rendition of it, is constantly reminds us of the gulf between the fantastical and the mundane. The visual palettes make the direct comparison between the two worlds, and then this sort of split personality continues in microcosm in the school itself and the scrapes into which our heroes get themselves. A detention served in the dark forest turns into an encounter with the Dark Lord himself, a game of Quidditch for the school team almost ends in Harry’s death when someone attempts to jinx his broom, and Hermione crying to herself in the toilets because she heard Ron say something mean about her almost results in her being killed by a mountain troll. As a metaphor for life, it’s not a bad one. We all find ourselves living normal everyday lives into which tragedy or extremes can intrude at any moment. The difference here is that it’s more apparent. These kids are going to school surrounded by stuff that could be actively dangerous to them, and they are constantly aware of this.

There’s a running joke that parents who send their kids to Hogwarts must be awful, given the constant danger they’re in there. I’d argue the opposite – what better way to prepare children for the endless inventive cruelty that sheer random chance can apply to even the most apparently settled of lives than to send them somewhere where danger is constant and obvious? Especially given their nature, and the need to hide this from the world at large.

Underpinning all this is a score by the maestro himself, John Williams. Like Star Wars and Superman before it, Williams’ Harry Potter theme is an indelible signature element of the character now, such that it’s hummed by anyone thinking of the character in any context – books, toys or the films themselves. Williams’ soaring, orchestral strings and choral accompaniment elevate every scene, adding mystery, wonder and excitement in exactly the right amounts.

As an adaptation of the book, it’s not perfect. Some scenes are altered or left out altogether (a feature that would become more apparent as the movies progressed, covering much larger books), and some characterisations feel off. Dumbledore in particular, as played by Richard Harris, is a twinkly grandfather type figure rather than the bohemian oddball of the novels, and certain other characters find themselves oddly toned down or altered (Warwick Davis suffering particularly badly under his Professor Flitwick costume which would thankfully disappear later on) but by and large it captures the essence of the source material in ways that few movie adaptations of books manage. Seventeen years later, I’m still very much on board the Hogwarts Express.