Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

American wizards are assholes.

This is, resoundingly, the message I came away with. They have strict pureblood laws and everything is resolved by a sentence to death. They are overwhelmingly joyless, and the 1920s era wizarding world portrayed in Fantastic Beasts lacks any sense of wonder from its inhabitants. The only person who seems to really enjoy magic is Jacob (left), which is tragic, as he's a muggle and there are strict laws about what muggles can know: precisely nothing.

American wizards appear to spend most of their time putting NYC back together, which is at least a nice change from all the movies that do nothing but tear it apart.

Newt Scamander came to America on a mission of mercy, to return a thunderbird to its rightful home in Arizona and instead gets caught up trying to retrieve his beasts that have escaped and save New York from an obscurial, a wizard whose repressed magical energies manifest into a death cloud.

Eddie Redmayne's performance as Newt is the most remarkable thing about this movie. I forgive him for Jupiter Ascending. Newt is shy, awkward, somewhere on the austistic spectrum, gentle, and deeply caring. He doesn't understand people innately, he understands animals. He almost never looks anyone in the eye, and his body language is constantly closed off .

He is an unlikely hero.

In turn, Colin Farrell is commanding as Percival Graves. Intense, intent, and hot damn. I am convinced Graves will be found tied up in a closet somewhere so he can rejoin future movies.

Tina Goldstein (left) and her sister, Queenie (right), are the only decent American wizards around. Of the two performances, Alison Sudol as Queenie is more memorable, because Queenie herself is a character--she's flighty and giggly and a caricature of what a woman in the 20s might have been like. Tina, the serious sister, has less flashy personality traits, and I will be surprised if anyone remembers her after they leave the theater.

Social media, Tumblr especially, got itself in an uproar over Fantastic Beasts based on the accusation that a) it takes place in Harlem and b) there are no black people. I can only assume that these posts were written by people who either didn't see the movie or know nothing about New York. Allow me to clear it up.

The movie does not take place in Harlem. There are three named locations in the film. I was looking for evidence of location, as was my roommate, and we identified the same three.

  1. Central Park
  2. City Hall and the City Hall subway stop
  3. Orchard Street

Central Park is the most northerly location on the list, and Harlem is north of that. Most of the movie takes place in generi-New York locations that could be literally anywhere. Brick and brownstone, that's all you see.

But what about background actors? Why are there no black people in the background?

Hold onto your butts. In the 1920s, New York City was 95% white. Current day Wichita, Kansas, is 72% white, the whole state of Kansas is 84% white, Iowa is 91% white, and what I'm telling you is that Manhattan was whiter than what you think of as the whitest places in the country today. The Harlem Renaissance was happening, but it was happening in Harlem. So, where are all the background black people in the movie? Probably north of Central Park.

Could they have chosen to make a movie where all American wizards were black or the story took place in Harlem? Sure. And that would have been interestingly racially charged, given how underground the wizarding community was and Grindlewald's goal of bringing his magical people out of the shadows and into an integrated society, but that isn't the movie they made. Instead they made a movie in which the president of MACUSA was black and no one batted any more of an eye than they did at goblin jazz singers and house elf bartenders, in which child abuse, shame, and repression were very bad things that caused mass destruction.

Last, and perhaps also least, the final reveal of the film. Anti-climactic doesn't feel like the right word. Maybe just... disappointment. Look, I like Johnny Depp, generally. I think he's a talented actor. But I cannot recall the last job he had that didn't involve ridiculous make-up. The repetition is making me tired.

I don't think Fantastic Beasts is bad, but I don't think it sparkles either. Hogwarts delivered daily wonders in a way that made magic... magical. But maybe this is what you should expect from turning an encyclopedia into a movie.

[/rating 3/5]

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 🔹 🔹