Set some 70 years before the events in the Harry Potter series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them centers on Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), author of what will become the official textbook for magical creatures at Hogwarts, as he fumbles about New York City with a suitcase full of magical creatures. Predictably, some of them escape, Newt must recapture them, and something less than hilarity ensues.
Fantastic Beasts is J.K. Rowling’s first attempt at writing a screenplay, and, apparently, what she really wanted to write was an episode of Dr. Who. If you put the fourth, fifth, and sixth doctors into a blender and hit puree, Newt Scamander is what you would get in terms of both look and mannerisms. Instead of a sonic screwdriver, he has several magical creatures small enough to carry on his person, and they serve the same function of facilitating lazy writing by simply doing whatever the plot requires at any given moment. Newt doesn’t have a TARDIS, but he’s got a suitcase that contains an extra-dimensional space large enough to accommodate an entire zoo of magical beasts.
When the movie isn’t trying to be Dr. Who, it’s channeling Men in Black. It’s chock full of gratuitous scenes of one weird beast after another that do nothing to advance the plot or develop the characters, but serve only to remind the audience that this is a magical world full of magical creatures. And to show off the CGI. Admittedly, it’s good CGI, but it’s still just eye candy for the sake of eye candy. The first time Newt has to chase down the kleptomaniac platypus, it’s funny. By the second time, it’s just old. And he has a bunch more to chase down after that. And he wrecks an awful lot of stuff as he’s chasing them.
You’d think people would notice the sheer quantity of destruction and mayhem the wizards leave in their wake, but the film also painfully borrows the now hackneyed device of routine memory wipes to keep the general population ignorant of the alternate world of wizards/aliens living right among them. It was getting old even before Men in Black was done, and by now it’s almost insulting.
Spoiler Alert
I was actually dreading the moment the wizards would use the Statue of Liberty to mind wipe the entire city of New York. When they did get around to mind wiping the entire city of New York, they used the even more ridiculous strategy of making it rain “forget you saw the wizards” potion. Apparently, they could carefully calculate the dosage so that a no-maj (American word for muggle) drenched with rain only forgot the wizard stuff and not how to drive a car or tie his shoes. And it worked on people who were indoors and out of the rain. Except for Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a no-maj who happened to be in the right/wrong place to become Newt’s companion. He was able to stand right next to the rain under an awning long enough to have a heart-warming goodbye before having his memory selectively wiped. Oh, and wizards were completely unaffected. And presumably the forget potion erases photographs. Or else the reporters are expected to look at the pictures they took during the final magical encounter, say “Gee, I don’t remember taking that,” and just throw them away. And I guess the newspaper magnate is just going to say “Gee, my son the senator is dead. I wish I could remember how that happened. Oh, well.” I would have felt less insulted by the writing if the wizards HAD just done something ridiculous with the Statue of Liberty.
End Spoiler
This could all have been forgiven if we had been given a reason to care about the protagonists, but, unfortunately, character development took a back seat to ambitious world-building. Unlike its predecessors, which initially focused almost exclusively on the microcosm of Hogwarts, this film immediately delved into the political and law enforcement apparatus of the magical world and also focused a lot of attention on the parallel no-maj world. It attempted to do too much, too quickly, and the result was a magical universe that lacked any magic.
The only 2 characters that were at all endearing were Kowalski and Queenie (Alison Sudol), a ridiculously powerful telepath. Newt was more irritating than interesting and Tina (Katherine Waterston), a disgraced magical investigator, was as bland and uninteresting as she could be. While there was some believable chemistry between Kowalski and Queenie, there was absolutely none between Newt and Tina. Most of the rest of the supporting cast seemed like they just showed up to collect a nice payday, with the exception of Colin Farrell, who managed to imbue Graves, the sinister investigator, with a real sense of menacing charm.
The story itself had too many competing subplots to do justice to any of them. The film tries a few “gotcha” twists, but they’re mostly predictable. The “big reveal” was given away in the first sixty seconds. The one shocking and, quite frankly, horrifying element comes at the very end of the film when the audience suddenly realizes that Johnny Depp is going to be the Big Bad for the next 4 movies.
Fantastic Beasts feels more like a prologue or opening chapter than a stand-alone movie. Which is exactly what it is. Originally conceived as a trilogy, plans to expand the series to 5 movies have already been announced. One can only hope that after spending an entire film building the world, they switch focus to building characters that we can care about.
Overall rating: 5.5/10
Take-away messages from the film, perhaps unintentional:
1) The American wizards were ENTIRELY justified in banning magical creatures.
2) The no-maj population is ENTIRELY justified in fearing the wizarding world and wishing it gone.
3) Magic must have degenerated over the course of the 20th century because the stuff the wizards circa 1926 were doing EFFORTLESSLY made the wizards of Harry Potter’s day look like mere dabblers. Or maybe it’s just that American wizards are that much better than Europeans.