Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

Fantastic Beasts follows Newt Scamander, a Wizard who studies magical animals, as he tracks down several monsters that have escaped into New York, while also being drawn into a conspiracy that threatens the world.

The first theatrical spin off of the Harry Potter franchise, Fantastic Beasts tries to take the franchise in a more adult direction, which I applaud.
The fan base for this series has grown up and with it a more mature change of direction is a good direction to take it (though debatable this franchise hasn’t really been a kids story since around the fourth movie, but I digress).

The issue is with the execution; the story has a metric ton of plot holes that really start to add up.
Characters do stupid things or know things because the plot needs them too, and the ending pulls a Deus Ex Machina out of it’s all to solve all the movies problems.
It’s really distracting when you keep asking, “wait, why is this person doing something stupid?”

The biggest sticking point was an execution scene; Newt discovers the villains identity and he tries to have him killed via a strange execution method where the prisoner is sat on a chair over what looks like Mercury that…I think it burns them. Drowns them? It’s really not clear, but that’s the least of the problems.
Why is the villain using this method? Can he do this? There’s no trial? We saw in the Harry Potter movies that they have a judicial system to imprison people, but execution can be assigned by whoever?
And why kill them? It makes him look really suspicious. A better method would be to use mind control (which this series has established does exist), have them attack someone in public and gun them down in self-defence? Or have them go free and draw attention away from you.
It raises so many questions that could be easily avoided, but they were really set on filming this scene so just worked it in.
A recurring issue when we get to the sequels, but let’s stay focused on this movie.

It’s a very ugly looking movie too.
There’s little life to any of the images, it’s all shades of grey and brown. And scenes in the dark become really difficult to see what’s happening.
There’s a scene where they enter the American Ministry of Magic and this whimsical music plays, but it looks washed out and unimpressive, so the music feels like it’s trying to hard to impress me.

I did enjoy the characters however; Newt himself, played by Eddie Redmayne, is well cast and delivers the idea of a social awkward man who communicates well with animals but struggles with people. Redmayne has great subtle acting to accentuate this; the way he avoids making eye contact, his speech feels nervous without mumbling so we can still understand him.
The ultimate test is that the main danger is a human, the one animal he can’t talk to well, so it’s great to see him overcome his shyness to help someone else.

Another aspect I enjoyed was the romance between the characters Kowalski and Queenie. They are both very likeable characters that have a real friendly energy to them, and they make for an extremely cute couple.
Sure hope the sequel doesn’t do anything to mess this up! (it does)

CONCLUSION

This is a flawed but not unsalvagable movie; I can generally accept issues like plot holes and unappealing visuals if the characters are right, but this really tested my limits.

I didn’t enjoy it, but it’s not without it’s merits, and I can see someone else getting into this movie even if I didn’t. However I can’t recommend it.
The original Harry Potter movies were mature enough and all really good movies (well, except maybe 4, but I enjoyed that more than this movie at least), so I would say they are more worth your time.