Harry Potter Trailer: HBO Is Rebuilding a World We Already Know By Heart With a 2.0 Version

Harry Potter Trailer: There are some trailers, especially the Harry Potter trailer, where you already know exactly what happens next and still find yourself leaning very close to the screen and reacting to each frame.

The train will leave platform 9 ¾; Harry will meet Ron; Hermione will become his close friend; there will be Gryffindor; Quidditch; a giant chessboard; and there will be something much darker waiting behind it all. We know it; we have known it for years, yet HBO’s latest look at Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone manages to do the one thing this rebuilding desperately needs it to do: make a world that has been etched in our brain and add a little unfamiliarity to it.

Harry Potter Trailer: Hogwarts Is Not Just a Backdrop Anymore

The biggest difference between watching the newly released footage and revisiting the film from 2001 is how Hogwarts is given the room to breathe.

We see the Great Hall; the students gathered together; Harry beginning to understand that this giant castle is not just where his adventure happens, but it is now his school, home and eventually the place where he finds the people who become family.

The distinction is not as small as it sounds. The original film has to move fast: there were books to compress, plots to establish and characters to introduce. A television series has the time, the movies never really had.

The first season is reportedly set to have eight episodes and adapt Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, giving the story more space to sit inside the details of Harry’s initial time, which can be the secret weapon. Perhaps, we would be able to see Harry at eleven; just being eleven, not fighting evil at eleven.

The Sorting Hat Still Knows How to Make an Entry

The Sorting Ceremony is definitely still here, and yes, we have seen it before, but there is something absurdly comforting about watching Harry sit beneath the Sorting Hat again, surrounded by hundreds of students and an entire room of waiting to find out where this boy belongs. Sorting Hat was never really about choosing a school house, but it was about belonging.

As Harry arrives at Hogwarts, he finds a place with his name waiting for him, and inevitably Gryffindor comes in.

Meet Harry, Ron, and Hermione 2.0

This is probably the most scrutinised part of the trailer: Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger, and Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley. The first instinct is obviously to compare, and it is obviously impossible to compare.

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint did not merely play these characters but had become the visual memory for an entire generation following Harry Potter. The new trio cannot spend so much time “recreating” them but would have to build their own chemistry.

There are glimpses of Harry and Ron together, Hermione knowing the best in the room, and the three slowly moving towards friendship that will eventually become the spine of the story. This is what makes the casting interesting; we are not looking for or at the “replacements” but another childhood.

The Trailer Remembers that the Story Gets Dark

The new Harry Potter official teaser trailer is not pretending that the story is fully merry. We get the darker corridors of Hogwarts, and there are also the late-story images that tell anyone who knows the book where we are heading.

There is a tonal shift which is important because Harry Potter has always been better at darkness than people remember; we just tend to remember the Christmas lights first.

The Real Challenge: How To Remake a Memory?

This is the question that hangs over the entire series. HBO can rebuild Hogwarts, redesign classrooms, put new faces, recreate the Sorting Ceremony, but how would it recreate the “first time” we saw it?

It perhaps should avoid that because the original Harry Potter films are no longer just a collection of movies; they have turned into childhood memorabilia for millions. They are the sleepovers and school holidays and even the DVDs until they practically stopped working.

These exist at the crossroads between memory and cinema that makes this reboot a strange proposition. It is not introducing Harry Potter but is asking us to say hi to him again.

Will It Feel New Then?

Perhaps not immediately. There are shots in the trailer that might make you revisit your childhood or the films basically. The costumes, locations and moments might feel so familiar that your brain sings the old songs automatically.

We, however, have new faces: e Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger, and Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley, among others. The new faces suddenly create a new echo, and perhaps that is the point. The series does not seem to erase the Harry Potter we already know by looking at the trailer; it does not need to convince us that the film never happened.

There is something new, slow and beautiful about the new one that does not replace the older version. This is perhaps a place where Hogwarts is not just a beautiful place Harry visits but a world he actually gets to live in, and that is something that makes the trailer work.

For a few minutes, it felt like the doors of Hogwarts had opened again; not for the first or even the last time, but just one more time, and honestly, after all the years, this is the magic trick HBO needed.

Watch the official teaser trailer on YouTube.

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