Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them
Director: David Yates
Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Colin Farrell, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Samantha Morton
The Harry Potter universe just got expanded.
Written by J K Rowling (it's her first script), Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them leaves the damp shores of Britain behind and opens in 1926 New York with bumbling magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a former Hogwarts student (and soon-to-be author on magical beasts that Harry Potter and his friends later study at Hogwarts) arriving in NYC after a year-long expedition spent searching out and collecting a menagerie of enchanted creatures of every size, shape and personality in his compact leather briefcase.
Then he bumps into Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) headed to the bank hoping to get a loan with which he planned to open a bakery. Briefcases are mixed up and the expected chaos ensues.
The opening installment of a projected five-film franchise, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is, for want of a better word, surprisingly bleak and feels like a two-hour long high-end, period-themed upgrade to the popular Pokémon GO game. You know, the location-based augmented reality game developed by Niantic where you basically run around town trying to capture various Poke beasts? Scamander is pretty much doing the same thing... and getting a workout out of it too.
Joined by Jacob, Porpentina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and her sister Queenie (Alison Sudol), they hunt through Manhattan for the magical beasts while the dark force and anti-wizard sentiment takes hold.
Also, there's too much mythology and unusually complicated scene(remember the one at the bank? There's so many levels of surveillance that it's hard keeping up) that make watching the film seem like a lot of work. That being said, the film no doubt stands on its own (there are no references “ sly or otherwise to anything in the Potter universe, so even if you haven't read/watched any of the previous books/films, you'll be feel from left out), but the story is thin, and the characters short on charm.
The CGI created magical beasties (furred and feathered beings with strange caws and showy displays) however, are no doubt "bewitching" to look at and will likely get better as we proceed down the line.
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J.K. Rowling has stated that this film "is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world. Newt's story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry gets underway"
Within the Harry Potter universe, Newt Scamander's "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" was first published in 1927 and became a massive bestseller, as well as an approved textbook at Hogwarts. By the mid-1990s, when the Harry Potter series is set, it was in its 52nd edition.
1926 the year the film is set is also the year Voldermort was born.
Eddie Redmayne auditioned for the role of Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) but was turned down after reading one line. Christian Coulson was cast instead.
