Movie Reaction: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Formula: Dr. Who + Harry Potter

Fantastic Beasts begins like any of the movies set in the Wizarding world. There's the WB logo. The same font for the title. The score is familiar but not quite what we've heard for 8 films. Something is conspicuously missing though: Harry Potter. That's of course because he hasn't been born yet. This isn't a Harry Potter movie. It's the same world, more or less, but not tied at all to the boy wizard who started the worldwide phenomenon.

Instead of a young boy, the film begins with a grown man: Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), already a fully educated wizard on his own. It's the 1920s and he's arriving to New York City by boat. Not a magical boat. Just a boat. It's more reminiscent to Brooklyn than The Sorcerer's Stone as far as beginnings go. Newt is not a man of many words. He has a suitcase that's up to something, but that's about it. Pretty soon, the contents of his suitcase start causing trouble around the city. He picks up a muggle nomag friend, Kowalski (Dan Fogler). And, he has a low-level officer for the Ministry of Magic MCUSA, Tina (Katherine Waterston) after him. At the same time, there's a series of disturbances around the city that threaten to expose the wizards to common people, and there's hushed whispers of an evil wizard named Grindlewald.

Despite being directly related to Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts actually has more in common with another British icon: The Doctor. Newt is a mysterious visitor in a strange land. A different time period from the present, no less. Like the Tardis, his suitcase is a lot larger on the inside than it looks. And a wand isn't so different from a sonic screwdriver. Like the Doctor, Newt works best when he picks up companions* and the story is no more about Newt than it needs to be.

*I'm going to go ahead and call Katherine Waterston a "Martha" and Dan Fogler a "Donna" or maybe a "Craig".

The Harry Potter series is very serialized. Fantastic Beasts, at least this first installment, is not. It's a stand-alone adventure: episodic film-making. I wasn't prepared for that. With all the talk of sequels to come, I assumed this would be 75% "laying pipe" and 25% procedural. It's more the opposite. The film sets a template for what these films will (or could) look like going forward. Knowing that now eases many of my initially sour reactions to seeing the film.

The cast is pretty delightful. Redmayne and Waterston are adorable. I'd watch a twee Romantic Comedy with the two of them as the leads in a heartbeat. Redmayne gives a very nervous performance. I spent the entire film hoping he would take a deep breath, even once. Newt is surprisingly lightly developed for a lead character. Fogler is the comedic effect and the emotional core of this story. For someone I barely remember seeing in anything before this, I was impressed with how well he fit into the world. Samantha Morton plays Waterston's sister and elevates the role beyond what's on the page. Others like Colin Farrell, Ezra Miller, and Jon Voight are plot devices more than characters.

J.K. Rowling's script is familiar to fans of her books. She has way more information about the American Wizarding community than she can fit in a single movie (and thankfully, she holds back rather than "exposition dumping" all over). She doesn't have the highest view of Americans, which is fine. There are a couple shots she takes which weren't needed for the story, but whatever. Bringing David Yates back to direct is a smart move to ensure consistency in the world moving from one series to the next.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them isn't going to be anyone's favorite movie. People forget how much the Harry Potter movies leveraged love of the books into love of the films. This lacks that fall back and does feel a little thin as a result. The cast works together quite well and the story does a good job suggesting the types of adventures possible outside of Hogwarts and Voldemort. I have some small gripes, but not enough to undo the whole thing. Similar to how I felt about the Hobbit movies, I'm just glad to be back in this universe again.


Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

After the Credits

(Some thoughts for if you've seen the movie)

-Colin Ferrell turns out to be Johnny Depp in disguise at the end. I can't be the only one who immediately thought of 2009's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus in which, after Heath Ledger's death, Depp and Ferrell played alternate versions of the same character. All I know is that I'm looking out for any Jude Law casting news now.

-I wish I had a better idea of who Newt Scamander was by the end of the film since the support cast is apparently all gone. Losing Kowalski hurt the most, because he made for an excellent pairing with Newt. His story arced about as well as I could've hoped though. Tina could've been a lot more developed. I hope she returns in the future. I get the feeling that Newt is fully developed as a character, but it'll take a few movies to recognize that. Kind of like on a TV show, the first few episodes don't feel right, but after a couple seasons, when you rewatch those first episodes, you realize that the characters were all there. You just didn't know them yet.