Voices: Stop fretting about the Harry Potter reboot – it can’t be worse than the original films
When we read a book, we tend to populate its world with details that don’t actually exist in the text itself. Sometimes we imagine things that go against the text entirely, inventing character traits and moments of worldbuilding that entirely contradict the intentions of the author. It’s one of the great joys of reading.
It’s also one of the big reasons book adaptations have such a bad rep. There’s nothing worse than investing tens of hours of your time in creating a vibrant and magical world in your head, only to find that some filmmaker has dared to use the visual medium of cinema to pigeonhole your favourite novel with their pesky auteurship.
Case in point: imagine my surprise when, at 11 years old, I sat down to watch the first Harry Potter film – an adaptation of a series I had spent the last three years obsessively reading and re-reading – only to find that Harry wasn’t a working-class kid from Manchester like he was in my head.
Sure, that’s a pretty eclectic complaint, but those movies have a lot of issues that make them poor adaptations. Characters are reduced to the most one-dimensional versions of themselves. Everything is tinged with an off-putting air of grandeur and solemnity. They’re love letters to a kind of twee British fairy tale that we made up to package and sell off to the Americans.
It’s why I’m excited about the recent news that HBO is planning to reboot Harry Potter as a TV show, with each season covering a different book in the series. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that those books are high art, but they’re a lot better than the I-took-a-tour-of-Oxford-once-and-now-I-assume-that’s-what-England-is-like fantasyland that Chris Columbus established in that first film, which somehow became the dominant aesthetic of the entire franchise.
Maybe we’ll get a version of Harry who isn’t a nepo baby who never shuts up about how terrible his life is, or a version of Hermione who doesn’t remind me of every 30-year-old I’ve ever met who still brags about their A-level results (but is suspiciously quiet about their university grades). Did you know that Ron has personality traits beyond “dumbest person in any given situation”? Not if you’ve only watched the movies, you don’t.
The worst thing HBO could do is try to remake the films, rather than go back to the source material and try to do something interesting with the books themselves. It would be a real shame if HBO squandered the opportunity, and instead just gave us more “baby’s first gothic fairy tale”.
Get weird with it. Maybe instead of having your creature design team just add wrinkles and loose skin to an animal that already exists, you could ask them to make something visually interesting for a change. Maybe try worldbuilding that extends beyond saying a funny word in a posh accent. Also – and I know this is blasphemy, but I have to say it – but maybe John Williams doesn’t need to score everything. I don’t think anything has done as much damage to my enjoyment of Harry Potter than the pseudo-profundity of that soundtrack.
There’s going to be a fair amount of pushback against this show, for reasons that should be obvious and are completely fair enough. But I can’t help but think that most of the anger that I’ve seen online is coming from the fact that people are just annoyed to be reminded that they’re ageing, as yet another thing from their childhood is repackaged for a younger generation. I don’t love it either, but people are acting like those movies came out a few weeks ago, and HBO is completely jumping the gun in adapting them again.
It’s been 22 years since that first film came out. That isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to wait before having another go at a property; especially one as popular as Harry Potter. There were only 23 years between Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson’s version. I bet people were having the same conversations about “besmirching the sanctity of the original” then too.
I guess the hardest thing to accept about this new Harry Potter show is that we shouldn’t really have an opinion about it at all. It isn’t for us. We’re no longer 10-year-old kids reading Chamber of Secrets by torchlight way past our bedtime; we’re grownups now, raising kids of our own (or in my case, writing 800 words about a series of children’s books). Maybe those kids should be the ones to form an opinion on it, instead of watching their parents get upset about a bunch of mediocre wizard films.
