Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the 2016 spin-off film
from the wildly popular and influential Harry Potter franchise. J.K. Rowling
steps into the screenwriter seat, creating new lore and stories for a period
some 70 years prior to the events of the Harry Potter franchise. David Yates
returns to direct his fifth film in the Potter-verse and the film stars Eddie
Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, and
Ezra Miller.
I’ll get right out in front of
it, this is the first film in the Potter-verse I did not enjoy and I left
feeling highly disappointed. There may be hope someday down the road, however.
On the positive end of things, I do think most of the characters were well
drawn. I started to care about Newt Scamander (Redmayne) and get invested in
his story, which was essential for any of this film to work. I also really
enjoyed Samantha Morton and her performance which had fascinating nuances and
was a lot of fun to watch. The other positive I will comment on is the general
aesthetic and the beasts themselves. This film has a lot of interesting things
(new and old from the Harry Potter films) that looked great on screen and the
beasts were all very creatively designed and felt like they were straight off
the pages of Rowling’s books.
That’s where my praise ends.
Beyond those slight elements, this film is formulaic, all over the place tonally,
and, though well-drawn, the characters aren’t given anything compelling to do.
For the most part this film plods along like a season of Pokémon with them
having to catch a variety of beasts set loose in New York and it ties in a
bunch of over-the-top set-pieces to do so. This keeps the film moving and
visually engaging but it lacks any narrative intrigue and I could not care less
about what was happening as a result. They then splice this material together
with slow universe building scenes (that were often very poorly scripted) and
some other plotlines that are extremely dark in nature in opposition to the fun
tone of the main through line. Despite all this going on, our characters are
not really given anything interesting to do. The interesting characters are
shoved into these simplistic corners, and the other characters are in complex
storylines, but not given anything to do acting-wise (Miller and Farrell in
particular had their talents wasted).
In addition to these problems,
there is the comedy. This film has some brutal comic relief. It has moments
where a good chuckle is merited and happens, but it is too frequently used, and
often too simplistic, that it gets old fast. Dan Fogler is given a lot of this
flat comedic dialogue and physical comedy throughout the film. This really
grated on me and I frequently hoped his character would go away somehow.
There is something I want to
discuss in this review that some will consider a spoiler. It is information about
the universe building and not the plot. If you would like to avoid that
consider this your SPOILER ALERT and
skip the paragraph immediately below.
A major thing I was excited to
see in this film was showing what the wizard community in the United States is
like. The Harry Potter films entirely kept us confined to the United Kingdom
and we intimately learned about their world and government. This film took us
out of that and had a great opportunity to establish some new interesting
elements. Unfortunately, this completely dropped the ball. Although I am not
British, from my knowledge of their history (and European history generally), I
felt a lot of their culture (particularly from the middle ages) woven into the fabric
of that world. It’s one J.K. Rowling knows intimately and effectively
presented. In Fantastic Beasts and Where
to Find Them I felt almost no sense of America in their wizarding
community. It certainly hits on a couple things from American history but none
of them are very interestingly used nor nuanced. For example, the film
definitely wants to hit a racism/slavery note, it definitely wants to hit
prohibition and Al Capone, and it definitely emphasizes the Salem Witch trials.
But that’s about it. It doesn’t highlight how or why American wizards are
culturally different from those in the United Kingdom. It doesn’t address any
of the revolutionary cultural elements quintessential to the fabric of America
(and particularly quintessential to its government). It just showed a world
completely devoid of any of the interesting things we expected to see and I
left this film feeling very down trodden about the whole situation.
Overall, I felt quite
disappointed by Fantastic Beasts and
Where to Find Them. I thought this film had some neat characters with
decent performances as well as some cool imagery but it lacked intrigue and
tonal consistency. It had weak comedy and had some setting elements that were
problematic. I have hope with the ending of this film that the other four films
in this series will be good, but this is the first (of nine) Potter films I
haven’t enjoyed.
Ryan’s Score: 5.5/10
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