More Beasts, Less Darkness

I very nearly didn’t cover this film. I watched it, on MaxThe oldest and longer-running cable subscription service, HBO provides entertainment in the force of licensed movies along with a huge slate of original programming, giving it the luster of the premiere cable service. Now known primarily for its streaming service, Max., when it first hit streaming, and while I thought it was a fun enough lark, it didn’t stick in my brain the way the Harry PotterFirst released as a series of books (starting in the UK before moving worldwide), the Harry Potter series gained great acclaim before even becoming a series of successful movies. Now encompassing books, films, a prequel series, and a successful two-part play, the series even now shows no end in sight. films did. Those movies were an epic, built towards a big conclusion that felt like it was planned from the very beginning. Fantastic Beasts, though, was a series of movies being written on the fly and, even in the first film, it felt like the “big story” was tacked on and ill-conceived. It wasn’t really obvious how the story could continue, or why it should have. And then, when I watched the first of the sequels, The Crimes of Grindelwald (which, I should note, I didn’t bother finishing), it was clear these movies weren’t going anywhere and had no plan. At that point I set this film aside and elected to not review it at all.

Of course, the other reason I didn’t want to touch this movie was because J.K. Rowling is a TERF and the less air we give her the better. The fact that she still has so much control over this franchise that the people making new games and TV shows have to consult with her means we’ll never be free of her no matter how much hateful shit she spews. It would be nice if she could just go away, maybe donate her stake in the franchise to a good charity (perhaps one supporting the LGBTQIA+ community) and we’d never have to hear about her again. That, of course, will never happen.

However, I do have a rule that I try and review everything that comes into my physical media collection. When FYE, the movie and music retailer, went tits-up and started closing its stores, I wandered by and found a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them for cheap. And not just cheap (although the price of two bucks was just right) but also used. Buying it used meant that Rowling wouldn’t get a dime of the sale and I could own the one tolerable movie of this franchise guilt free. At that point I figured what the hell, let’s get it out of the way so that, hopefully, we never have to discuss this film series again.

Very loosely based on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the 2001 book made up to look like an in-universe textbook that would have appeared at Hogwarts University, the film follows that book’s author, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), on an adventure to New York in 1926. A magizoologist, Newt is in the Big Apple to try and recapture a Nifler, a beast he keeps in his traveling case. That traveling case, it should be noted, is really a portal to a pocket dimension, a realm where Newt keeps all kinds of mythological beasts and tends to them. He keeps them safe as magical animals are his passion. Unfortunately, Newt and another man, Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), unwittingly switch cases, which causes much consternation for both of them.

While Newt works to get his case back he also has to contend with Tina Gioldstein (Katherine Waterson), a former auror who believes that Newt has illegally imported magical creatures into the country. The switched cases actually let Newt dodge those charges. However, when Jacob accidentally unleashes more creatures into the world, Newt, Jacob, and Tina will have to work together to recapture them. And, in the process of this, there are dark tidings at the Halls of Magic in New York that could spells a rising threat, a dark wizard with aspirations to take over the world and kill all who stand in his way. This is just the first adventure in a quest that could see Newt and his company fighting for the fate of the world, wizards and witches, muggles and no-maj alike.

In its original concept, Fantastic Beasts was just a textbook, a fun and silly resource set in the Wizarding World that allowed readers to think about how that world worked. It was a fun, expanded universe but of fluff and, had the movie adaptation (loose as it is) remained a fun and silly bit of fluff I think it would have worked. This is a lighthearted story, at its core, about a guy that really loves magical creatures and wants to see them cared for. If the story had stuck to just that I think it could have been a winner. Frankly, these are the best parts of the film and it’s at its strongest whenever it focuses on this main plot.

Credit where it’s due, Redmayne is great as Newt. He’s nebbish and nervous and not at all the traditional action hero. In a different, darker film we’d need a stronger lead, but for this adventure about a dude who really likes animals, Redmayne’s performance as Newt is pitch perfect. He seems exactly like the kind of guy that would have spent his whole life devoted to animals, studying them, finding them, collecting them to keep them safe in his magical pocket dimension. And he has natural chemistry with the rest of the performers around him, making him the effective heart and soul of the movie.

For the most part the other performers around him (save two) are great. Waterson is solid as the nervous, trying-to-hard former auror, Tina. She strives for perfection but watches as everything falls apart around her time and again, and Waterson plays that perfectly. And she has solid romantic chemistry with Redmayne, helping to sell their story. And there’s. Fogler as Jacob, the aspiring baker and (soon enough) best friend of Newt. Fogler plays him perfectly, selling the passion Jacob feels for his pastries as well as he does the character’s confusion over all the new, magical things he’s being exposed to. I really enjoy the central group of characters.

Where the film struggles is in trying to be part of a larger epic. Rowling, clearly, has one story to tell and it’s the rise of a Dark Lord looking to control the whole of the Wizarding World so he can rule. We know this because that’s the exact story she told in the Harry Potter books, with the rise of Voldemort. She gives us that story again, here, with Grindelwald, another Dark Lord who feels like “carbon copy Voldemort”. There isn’t anything new or fresh or interesting for this storyline as it’s just another dark guy being dark while using forbidden magic. We’ve seen all this before.

Now, the film doesn’t call him Grindelwald for much of its runtime. Instead he’s Percival Graves, played by Colin Farrell, only revealed to be the true Dark Lord Grindelwald in the last scenes of the film in a twist that, well, only really pays off if the following movies turn Grindelwald into someone worthy of being feared. Spoilers: they do not. Grindelwald is a muddled character without a lot of interesting facets to him, and this film seems to struggle to make him into a character we can care about in any way (even just to fear him). His last minute reveal only helps to blunt the impact of his character before then because suddenly he’s played by a different actor, Johnny Deep as the revealed Grindelwald, and he feels like a whole new (underwritten) person. You just don’t give a shit.

Meanwhile we also have a second “villain” in the piece, kind of. Ezra Miller plays Credence Barebone (and, wow, Rowling really sucks at names), a troubled boy with secret dark powers. What these powers are and how they’ll play out in the rest of the film series isn’t really well documented (or even hinted at) here, and that’s because Rowling didn’t know at the time (and, from everything I’ve seen about the later movies, still doesn’t). He’s a deus ex machina in human form, a kid with a magical beast latched onto him, so it makes sense why Newt has to be involved. If he can free the beast he can save the kid. But Credence’s storyline doesn’t really get tied up here, and so many things are left unknown, and undefined, about him, that he feels like a half-baked, unexplored entity. We need more and the film doesn’t provide that.

Frankly, the way the film needed to handle this whole story was to have Newt going in search of beasts, like he does, when he comes across Credence. He could work to help the kid, to save him from the dark beast attached to him, and then afterwards Pervical (or Grindelwald, or whoever) could have come to Credence and said, “I have such plans for you,” leaving all of the Rise of Grindelwald and his story out this flick for a later work not tied so directly to New Scamander and his various fantastic beasts.

Because here’s the thing: Newt only works in the context of the beasts. The second you try to put him in any other storyline, even in this movie, he seems lost. He’s not the hero to take down a Dark Lord (which he notes repeatedly in the sequels). He gets shoehorned in because Rowling decided that Fantastic Beasts would be the launch pad for a whole new series of movies (five were planned, only three got made) when he’s a bad fit for the story at hand. Instead of making Newt the hero of the further films, all titled Fantastic Beasts this and Fantastic Beasts that, Newt should have left the series after this film and someone else introduced here should have become the lead. Someone investigating magical crimes. Someone trained to battle the dark arts. You know, like Tina.

The whole film is a befuddling mess. There’s a great story of a guy looking to find and collect magical creatures. That’s his job, he’s passionate about it, and the film around him focused on that task is great. As soon as Newt ends up in any other kind of story though, even here, the film gets far less interesting. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is two-thirds of a great movie, one-third terrible setup for worse movies to come. Those movies aren’t worth watching and, sadly, because so much of their setup is shoved into this film this movie gets dragged down as well.

It’s for the best, though. The less money we have to shove towards Rowling the better, all things considered.