"Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets"
PG
161 minutes
2002
Warner Bros.

See also our review of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" (2004)


This Disney-esque fantasy film deserves not to be banned under the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Even
though it is packed with action, adventure and unique settings, it's not
a great film from our point of view: it deserves a neutral to positive
rating.

On the down side, once again we have a fantasy film encouraging people to
escape today's socially caused problems. See our comments on the "Lord of the
Rings" for the whole problem with the fantasy genre.

On the plus side, the negative aspects of wishing for magic instead of confronting
social problems are mitigated by the fact that young children have the powers of magic.
It is not one or two wizards manipulating the whole world in "Harry Potter" and in fact,
the democracy of popular participation in magic is the content of the film's plot.

A supposedly pure-blood wizard minority disagrees with the wizard majority and seeks
to kill all the non-pure-blood wizards. The enemy takes the form of a blonde-haired boy
and his father--an obvious allusion to Hitler's Aryan race.

Although some wonder whether Harry Potter himself would qualify as a pure-blood, in
fact he sides with the democratic majority, including the products of inter-marriage.
With help from other young children and some adults, Harry Potter defeats the evil
Nazi-like plot to kill most off most of the wizards by way of a 60 foot snake in the
"chamber of secrets."

The fact that Harry Potter is so ordinary and reserved accentuates the film's democratic
aspects while the fascist "slithering" side curses the majority and takes on airs of an
elite. Young children also learn magic from reading books, thus again accenting the
accessible aspect of power.

The movie accepts as its context something of an English boarding-school atmosphere. At the
end of the film, the faculty abolishes examinations with all the children cheering. We take it
that learning will now take place in practice as it had in the crisis of the wizard school.
Harry Potter and his allies learned to fight in
non-academic 
practice, not from studying for exams.

With car driving, spells that defeat adults and the abolition of exams, this film appeals to
the fantasy of children. Harry Potter starts as an ordinary child forced to stay in his room
while the father-figure caring for him angles for important business deals. Out of this stifling
context and the possibly stifling teacher-student relationship, Harry Potter successfully emerges,
so this film is not all bad.