You get great sound (Dolby Digital 5.1 EX) and John Williams score sounds crisp. The video transfer looks fantastic. Let’s hear a round of applause. The problem seems to come with the extras.
The Sorcerer’s Stone DVD lacked anything worthwhile when it came to extras. The games were just ridiculous. You had to work to see anything and it just got downright aggravating. Fun for kids, but it easily angers us lazy adults. That wasn’t played out again on the Chamber Of Secrets DVD, although there still are some games.
Disc one has trailers and that’s pretty much it. Disc two has the real extras. You get nineteen additional scenes, some last a few minutes and some about thirty seconds. There are some that really don’t enhance the experience and a few that actually seem to shed some light on things, but in the end you understand why they were cut loose.
The biggest reason to watch disc two is for the indepth interviews with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and screenwriter Steve Kloves. It’s a nice little look into the adaptation of the novel into the film. There is alos a great featurette on the making of the film through a behind the scenes look. Honestly I would have liked to have seen more from this.
What I really would have liked to get more of was interviews with the professors and students, much more. It seemed like they threw this together in a few minutes. Many of the cast who you’d really like to hear from aren’t even there. I’d have loved to get a chat with the cast out of costume.
The games are again a bore. My son had a go at the games and was bored halfway through. The other activities like Gilderoy Lockhart’s Classroom is nothing more than a story and picture section, not very exciting considering the character is far from interesting. The Spellcaster Knowledge challenge is not worth being included in its current state. What would have been interesting would have been using some spells on things such as you break a window with one spell and choose which spell to fix it. Instead they give you a scene from the film and you hear the spell and you figure out what the spell does. Well if you watched the film it’s completely obvious and almost painful to go through again.
Frankly: The extras aren’t extra-special, but they do add a small appeal to this set. The main reason you buy the DVD is for the movie and it is definitely a film for the ages. We’ve had the DVD for two days and my kids have watched it four times already, I’ve seen it twice myself.
+ charlie craine
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