Before you press play
Watch if
You are a Harry Potter fan who wants the wizarding world to feel bigger and stranger.
Wait if
You want a self-contained ending, or you are watching on a phone in daylight.
The third Harry Potter film is where the series stops feeling like a school story. It also plays better the second time, because almost every odd little detail turns out to be evidence. First time through it is a 3.5. On a rewatch it is a 4, and the difference is entirely the film's own doing.
What Alfonso Cuarón changed
Alfonso Cuarón took over from Chris Columbus and rebuilt the look of the series in one go. Hogwarts stopped being lit like a television set and started to look like a place, the students began wearing their own clothes, and the castle gained a clock tower and a hillside. A bus that should not fit between two lanes of traffic is stranger and funnier when the street around it looks real.
Aunt Marge inflating over the garden and the Knight Bus ride that follows do little for the central mystery.
Cut either and the mystery survives intact. They exist to tell you the wizarding world is bigger and odder than Chris Columbus let on, and at that job they both work. The Knight Bus is where the horror technique running under this film first becomes obvious: its conductor and driver are shot like something out of a different genre, and they land harder than the werewolf does later.
Albus Dumbledore, Remus Lupin and Sybill Trelawney
Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) is the biggest change, and it is a writing change before it is anything else. He is arch now, and plainly enjoying himself, dismissing an executioner with thanks, announcing that he will be having a large brandy, whacking a patient's broken leg on his way past. The costume follows the script, not the other way round: tie-dyed silk that floats behind him in place of heavy ceremonial robes.
What that buys in charm it spends in gravitas. The script hands this headmaster jokes where the earlier films handed him authority, and the aura of a man the whole room defers to goes with them.
Sybill Trelawney (Emma Thompson) is the one worth the ticket. Emma Thompson sketched the look herself, from the idea of a woman who has not checked a mirror in years, and she is hard to recognise underneath it. Remus Lupin (David Thewlis) turns up looking like he has not slept in a week and proves to be the best teacher Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) has had, and the one who gives him somewhere to put the sound of his mother screaming.
The Dementors and the Patronus
The Dementors are where the growing-up idea stops being a lighting change. They make Harry hear his mother die, which turns grief into something with weight and a temperature. Remus Lupin's answer is to teach him a spell strong enough to stand against them, and the Patronus lessons hand an old wound back to Harry as something he can use.
Is Prisoner of Azkaban worth watching twice?
More than its predecessors are. The film plants its evidence in plain sight and lets you feel clever about it later. Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) keeps materialising in classes she cannot possibly have reached in time, and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) keeps complaining that her cat is hunting his rat. Both read as running gags on a first viewing. Both are the answer.
The Hogsmeade sequence does the heavy lifting. Harry sneaks in under a cloak and overhears three adults explaining his own history to a barmaid. The scene is the film's biggest block of exposition outside the Shrieking Shack, and the one it stages as eavesdropping, with none of it delivered straight to Harry.
What the film leaves out
It names the man who betrayed James and Lily without explaining how he was in a position to, so the last act lacks the history that makes it work. The Marauder's Map loses its history the same way, since the film never says who drew it or who the four names on it belong to. Both are gaps the film has to answer for.
The Quidditch is the other cut and it costs nothing. One match survives out of a season's worth, and its job is to put Harry in the air in a storm with Dementors underneath him. That job is why the sport is in this film at all, and it is a better reason than a trophy.
The ending is a bridge more than a climax. It introduces people and opens doors where the two films before it tied themselves off, and this is where it feels least finished.
Why Prisoner of Azkaban is so dark to look at
Now for the real fault. Michael Seresin threw out the bright, even lighting of the earlier films and lit the castle from whatever light source was in the room, which is a defensible choice and a beautiful one wherever a Patronus is involved. It also goes far enough that whole stretches are hard to read: faces you cannot make out, action you lose track of, scenes where you are working out the geography, not watching it.
Harry's flight on Buckbeak over the lake is the counter-argument, and the prettiest thing the series has managed. You can see all of it. The other counter-argument is John Williams, on his third and last score for these films. The main theme still carries the whole picture, and the score took one of the film's two Oscar nominations.
Four bulbs, and BLAZING. Prisoner of Azkaban is the funniest and the best-looking film in the series to date, and the one that most rewards paying attention; what stands between it and a higher score is how often it is too dark to see. Watch it twice.
Why Sirius was in Azkaban. Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) spent twelve years there for what Peter Pettigrew (Timothy Spall) did. Everyone believed Sirius had betrayed James and Lily Potter to Voldemort and then murdered Pettigrew, who had in fact betrayed them and faked his own death.
Scabbers. Ron Weasley's (Rupert Grint) rat spends the film being hunted by Hermione Granger's (Emma Watson) cat, and the joke curdles the moment you learn why. Pettigrew has been a Weasley family pet for twelve years, three of them in a boys' dormitory. Every earlier scene reorganises itself around that.
The Shrieking Shack. The film's biggest revelation is also its funniest scene. Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), Remus Lupin (David Thewlis) and Sirius spend it needling each other like men who have been having the same argument since school, which is exactly what they are. Playing a reveal partly for laughs should not work and does. Gary Oldman has very little time to turn a film's worth of suspicion around, and does it by letting the mania drain out of Sirius, without asking anyone to trust him at once. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) stops them killing Pettigrew, because a living Pettigrew clears Sirius.
How the frame worked, in the novel. The Fidelius Charm hid the Potters inside one person's secret, and everyone believed Sirius was that Secret-Keeper (chapter 10). In chapter 19, Sirius says he persuaded James and Lily to choose Pettigrew instead, expecting Voldemort to hunt the obvious friend. Cornered by Sirius, Pettigrew blew the street apart, killed twelve Muggles and escaped into the sewers as a rat, leaving behind a finger he had cut off himself. The finger made Pettigrew a victim and Sirius a murderer.
The potion. The clouds clear. Sirius asks Lupin, "Have you taken your potion tonight?", Lupin turns into a werewolf, Pettigrew escapes, and Snape steps in front of the children minutes after Harry knocked him out. The novel calls it Wolfsbane, brewed by Snape, and has Lupin forget to take it that night (chapters 18 and 19).
Trelawney's second reading. Sybill Trelawney's (Emma Thompson) tea-leaf lesson is a joke. Her trance is not, and you get no help telling them apart at the time. It starts paying off the same night when Pettigrew runs, and finishes in the next film.
The Time-Turner. Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) tells Hermione three turns should do it, and the rules are thin: do not be seen, and be back before the last chime. The loop is closed: every odd thing from the first time through was them. Hermione threw the stones that came through Rubeus Hagrid's (Robbie Coltrane) window, she howled to draw the werewolf away, the axe they heard fell on a pumpkin after they had led Buckbeak off, and the figure Harry took for his father across the lake was Harry himself, casting the Patronus. Nothing is changed, only completed. Inside this story time travel fulfils events instead of rewriting them, which is a neater trick than it first looks.
Where the Time-Turner came from. Hermione got it from Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith) in the first term, to reach all her lessons. In the book, McGonagall had to vouch for her to the Ministry (chapter 21).
The ending. Buckbeak carries Sirius away from the tower, Lupin resigns, and Pettigrew runs, so Sirius stays a wanted man and cannot give Harry the home he offered. The mystery closes; hardly any of its consequences do. After two films that tied themselves off, this one hands you a Firebolt with a hippogriff feather and a set of open questions.
Bright Bulbs
- Warwick Davis conducts a choir of students holding live toads, and the toads keep time. The plot does not need it and the film is better for it.
- The production moved Hagrid's hut onto a hillside and gave it a pumpkin patch and a chimney. Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) finally looks like he lives somewhere.
- Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) milks a broken leg for most of the third act, and it is the best running joke in the series so far.
- Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) gets punched in the face by Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), and the scene gets to be as satisfying as it sounds.
Shattered Bulbs
- Long stretches are underlit to the point of illegibility. You lose faces, and sometimes you lose the shape of a scene entirely.
Cast
- Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter
- Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley
- Emma Watson as Hermione Granger
- Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore
- Robbie Coltrane as Rubeus Hagrid
- Gary Oldman as Sirius Black
- David Thewlis as Remus Lupin
- Emma Thompson as Sybill Trelawney
- Alan Rickman as Severus Snape
- Maggie Smith as Minerva McGonagall
- Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew
- Robert Hardy as Cornelius Fudge
- Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy
- Pam Ferris as Marge Dursley
- Richard Griffiths as Vernon Dursley
- Julie Christie as Madam Rosmerta
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Sorcerer's Stone
Chamber of Secrets
Prisoner of Azkaban
Goblet of Fire
Order of the Phoenix
Half-Blood Prince
Deathly Hallows: Part 1
Deathly Hallows: Part 2
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