[4.6/10] When the word came out that J.K. Rowling was not only going to write a film based on her very brief, storyless, enjoyable trifle of a book, *Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them*, but that there would be an entire trilogy, I wasn’t especially concerned. While there is barely enough in the original book for a series of shorts, let alone a trio of films, I chalked it up to the usual demands of commerce. *Fantastic Beasts* was simply a recognizable enough brand name that provided Rowling cover to once again play around in the Wizard World and tell a new story.
And that’s pretty much what we get in the film adaptation of *Fantastic Beasts*. While there are plenty of elements lifted from the book, the bulk of the film is made from whole cloth. It’s a story of Newt Scarmander, a lover and conservationist of the titular fantastic beasts, coming to New York City to help one of his creatures and getting embroiled in a magical conflict with the American wizarding government as the specter of Gellet Grindlewald, the Voldemort of his day, looms large.
But while that should be freeing -- a chance for Rowling to unleash her imagination and talents as a storyteller in a familiar world but a different setting, without the chosen one narrative to guide or be subverted -- the result is a film that feels formless, aimless, and at times straight up incoherent. To call the screenplay, penned by Rowling herself, meandering is understating it. This is a film where events simply roll into one another, long detours are par for the course, and the point of any given action or larger story is, at best, opaque.
Some of that might be tolerable if the characters who populate the film were more interesting. Eddie Redmayne is fine as Scarmander, but beyond the fact that he wants to protect his animals and a barely-sketched notion that he has trouble making friends, his character makes little impression and certainly isn’t compelling enough to drive this story. Tina, the demoted American auror who helps him is almost a complete cipher, given some perfunctory “she just cares too much” shading, but otherwise written and played as a blank slate.
Colin Farrell has more luck as the closest thing in the film to a true antagonist, giving the film’s best performance, but even he is hampered by the writing. The character carries such an air of mystery that the film walks on eggshells in delving into his motivations and personality, lest too much of that mysterious vibe be exposed. The questions of what his angle is lead to doublespeak and vagary that waste one of the few layered performances in the picture.
And the only bit of charm comes from the chemistry between Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a No-Maj (the American term for muggles) who dreams of opening a bakery and Queenie (Alison Sudol), Tina’s friendly sister with a gift for mind-reading. They offer the rare bit of levity in a film that is often needlessly grim without nearly enough of the whimsy of *Harry Potter* to balance it out. Otherwise, the film is populated with dead-faced performances from nearly the entire rest of the cast, where no one really leaves an impression.
That is as much a product of the script as anything though. It is unclear, at best, what anyone’s motivation in this film is. Beyond vague, generalized notions, you barely get to know any of these people long enough to care about their quests before they’re thrown into some standard bit of pre-viz spectacle. The story threads are jumbled and unclear, making the moments when they intersect, and the characters’ parts in moving them along, as much of a dull muddle as the rest of the film.
The saving grace for a movie like this -- one where the story, characters, and performances suffer or stagnate -- is the visuals. But *Fantastic Beasts* falters there too. The omnipresent CGI in the film is incredibly underwhelming, with moments where the human characters interact with the magical creatures seeming particularly unbelievable. While the designs of the creatures are interesting enough, and some like the niffler are even cute, the style of the film can’t find the right balance between cartoony and realistic.
That gives everything in the film an antiseptic quality. The animals feel pasted into the film over the flesh and blood actors rather than integrated into the scenes. The humanoid characters plunge deep into the uncanny valley from the word go. And overall it’s just an unpleasant film to look at, with obviously fake backgrounds and weightless CGI robbing the film of the sort of awe that Harry’s first steps into Hogwarts generated. Only the particle effects of the mysterious Obscurus offer anything impressive from a visual standpoint.
Thematically, the film offers a few reheated lessons about repression and prejudice. A young wizard in the care of a witch-hater is eaten up inside from being called a freak and treated accordingly. Scarmander turns his nose up at the way American wizards and witches turn their nose up at having any associations or contact with non-magical folk. The X-Men-like metaphors of some gifted individuals wanting to make peace with muggles, some wanting to keep a safe distance, and others wanting to position themselves as the superior peoples are fine, but not particularly novel or well-done. There are decent ideas at play in *Fantastic Beasts*, but none is really fleshed out or explored enough amid this hodge-podge of a film to merit real thought or praise.
The best thing to say in favor of the movie is that it continues with the project of worldbuilding that enraptured so many in the *Harry Potter* series. While in other works set in this universe, it often felt like the whole world revolved around Hogwarts, *Fantastic Beasts* shows a distinctly American slice of wizardom, with different slang, different attitudes about interacting with “no-majs,” and different government officials and policeman to contend with. Rowling even includes some friendly rivalry between the two countries’ wizarding schools. While the film doesn’t do much with it, it’s nice to see Rowling & Co. expanding the world a little bit.
But that’s cold comfort in a two-hour slog of a film. Director David Yates, who helmed the last set of *Harry Potter* films, knows this world almost as well as Rowling. But the product the two present is at times indulgent, wheel-spinning, garbled, ugly, and worst of all boring. There is so much potential in this blank slate -- an opportunity to explore the Wizarding World and its history beyond the seven year stretch of Harry’s adolescence. Instead, *Fantastic Beasts* gives a series of half-finished ideas and characters, stitched together around uninspired, CGI-heavy sequences, with little to show for it beyond a minor expansion of the mythos and a couple of decent reveals. By the end of the film, you’ll be wishing the aurors had used the memory charm on the audience, and fooled you into thinking you’d watched a different, better movie.
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