Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them | 100 Movies Bucket List

 

I was a big Harry Potter fan while the original movies were coming out. And while I still love the first 5, I lost interest in everything else about it. So when these new films came out, I never really paid attention and had no interest in seeing them.

I don't really know what to make of this movie.

I liked it more than I thought I would, but I didn't think I'd like it at all so that's not saying much!

Although this is rooted in an familiar world, it's set in an unfamiliar location for these movies, which I guess is supposed to put a new twist on what we already know of Harry Potter.

For me, this didn't work that well. I feel like I needed more familiarity to really like the story. This is just personal preference but what made me like Harry Potter wasn't the magic system or the world, but the characters and their relationships.

I didn't feel anything for these characters. I wasn't interested in them at all, and because of that, I didn't really care about the events of the film.

Other than rebooting the HP franchise, I don't really know what the point of this film was. And that's not about whether the film was good or bad, but it just seemed like an odd place to start. If the HP franchise was a TV show, this movie feels like a mid-season filler episode. We don't care about the characters or the magical creatures, so why is so much of the film based on them?

But in saying that, while I didn't care about the characters, I did like them - particularly the four main characters. I liked seeing them interact, I thought they were fun, and if I was more interested in the plot, I probably would have cared about them a lot more.

They were also played really well. Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler and Alison Sudol were the best things about the film and made it worth watching.

All in all I thought the film was fine. It had some interesting moments, including the ending which I actually really liked, but it wasn't interesting enough for me to be truly engaged the entire time. So I don't think this is a franchise I'll be continuing with.