Review of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) by Aka A — 24 Dec 2016

Before going to watch this movie I had been told by several people that it was "amazing", "the best film of the year"; one woman even told me it was better than the original Harry Potters to which my response was "alright calm down love, lets not get carried away here".

I would just like to say before I get into the essay of what is wrong with this movie, it is still a very good movie and one that I would definitely watch again, hence my 4 star rating, it just wasn't as good as people told me it was.

Firstly, for JK Rowling's first screenplay the story, in itself, is a very good and compelling one. However, I feel that she is so used to writing books with many twists and turns and the story had too many plots and sub-plots for a movie.

It spent too much time jumping from sub-plot to sub-plot, and trying to set up the plot of the next movie, that it got it a bit too chaotic. Another thing that ruined the film for me was it became too American.

I don't mean in the sense that it was set in America, I don't mind that and I think that added a more complexity to the wizarding world and made it feel more real that it was transnational. I mean it in the sense that, everything was being blown up.

The story reverted to the classic American movie tactic of destroying literally everything in their wake to try and make it more exciting. It just wasn't necessary. In classic American style, everything was too big and exaggerated.

For example, the beauty of the Alohomora spell, and how simple and magical that was portrayed in the original Potter stories, was ruined by its first use in the movie on a bank safe. I don't think I have ever seen an American movie where the words "we need to contain the situation" aren't followed by the characters absolutely ripping entire cities to shreds, and this film kept with that American tradition.

Because of both of these things, for me, the movie didn't feel magical. I didn't get the warm and amazing feeling I got when I watched the old Potter movies or read their respective books. Everything was too big and because of this, whenever magic was shown, I wasn't in awe of the magic, I just though "the special effects are cool".

While you want the effects to be cool, you don't want to think about them being effects, you want to feel the magic, and I just didn't get that from any point in this movie. The best parts of the movie were the quiet and reserved scenes between the 4 main characters or when little magic was being used, because in this world, magic and love go hand in hand, and you never really got both together, everything was either too big and American or you got the quiet loving scenes.

Looking forward to the next movie, it should be better now that they have a direction as I think this movie was just setting up the characters, but my advice would be to reign it in a little, stop blowing so much stuff up, magic doesn't have to be extravagant, its often the smaller things that make you believe.