Fantastic Beasts Script Doctor

so let's pretend that JK rowling one of the greatest authors of our time came to me for feedback on her new wizard screenplay I took a writing class one time so I'm qualified well overall I did like fantastic beasts which has nothing to do with me being a huge obsessive Harry Potter fan but right now I'm going to constructively talk about some issues I had with it and give feedback on how to fix it let's do it by the way oh my god every spoiler don't watch this until you've seen it or decided you don't care problem number one it had exactly as much filler as I was pretty sure it was going to so watching the trailers I was like huh I'm really excited to see more of The Wizarding World and like it's cool that it's set in America that's different but hey it kind of looks like a lot of this action is just chasing monsters around and trying to catch them while they make a lot of noise it's a lot like the critically acclaimed masterpiece lilo and Stitch the series but trailers always put in like the action nonsense sequences so you're like oh it's moving as action so I was like I'm sure there's a lot more going on other than that there really wasn't I feel like I'm like becoming an old lady and when I go to movies and they have one of those scenes where it's just like stuff is getting wrecked and there's a fight I'm always just like here comes lots of noise and it just I just feel like bombarded I like sit back in my seat and I get all flinchy it's like the cinematic version of sitting somewhere where there's like a person in front of you with a spray bottle and they're just spraying you in the face with this spray bottle for like nine minutes like I don't get it who likes that who's asking for those scenes ten-year-old boys the answer is ten-year-old boys anyway how am I going to fix this one because the plot is just like Newt has to round up his creatures and my reworking of the script Newt says to his 80 friends I don't know my creatures are loose and I got to go find them they go on this madcap adventure through New York City they're like following this trail of silly destruction nothing lethal because it's like whimsical and finally this trail leads them to a little alley and he goes inside and all of his creatures are just all together in one place quietly resting in a consolidated pile kind of like oh there they are and he just opens a suitcase and that's it and then the story can continue and it's very quiet and peaceful number two none of these locations are as magical as the Harry Potter films so I do realize that Harry Potter had an unfair advantage because like their books so there's more room for stuff for world building stuff also that was sat at a school one school for seven years so you get to revisit the same locations over and over again but also let's be real like this setting is way less cool too I mean like let's look at Harry Potter and acknowledge that even the really miserable places in the book are places that people would want to visit you better believe that if Universal Studios had like a Malfoy Manor dining experience or like a Chamber of Secrets bounce house or the Voldemort resurrection cemetery taco truck Pavillion I would be there immediately and so would a lot of other people I'm not sure I'm as stoked to visit magical places like 1920s muggle New York customs office us lizard government building Goldstein sisters two-bedroom apartment or who could forget crazy witch hunters desolate orphan soup kitchen could be a buffett area style restaurant I did think the Wizard execution chamber was cool but not in like a hey let's go there kind of way the thing is the Harry Potter films weren't just set in London they were set in Wizarding London and this film is just set in New York and it's a version of New York that doesn't even have Newsies I mean it definitely seems like the deliberate standout location was the inside of noot suitcase and we've had bags with stuff inside of them and Harry Potter before like we had Hermione's purse that could fit a bunch of stuff and there was a whole year where mad-eye moody was trapped in a trunk probably not even the saddest year of mad-eye moody slave anyway they spent a long time showing us the interior of the suitcase but the whole thing was like so CG heavy that you had no sense of like a real location at all it also was bad because it kind of ruined the whole idea of newts conservation mission like I don't know it kind of looked like he had perfectly adequate space for all of his creatures right in the suitcase and he didn't have to go anywhere and do anything I mean it's the suitcase that seems to have shifting walls and no borders and it has perfect magical replicas of their exact natural environment and they'll seem really happy and safe and stuff and like not getting attacked by poachers I get that the suitcase is supposed to equal zoo enclosure where you're like it's nice but it's not the wild but it kind of is because like even a really nice zoo their limitations usually just gonna be space like space is limited space is expensive but space is not an issue here unless like you mean to tell me that Newt Scamander can have a suitcase with a five-acre interior but six acres is silly and impossible and if it is he could just get another suitcase maybe suitcases like that are expensive but you know what else is expensive a voyage to America anyway here's how we're going to punch up the locations according to me so we're gonna set the film entirely in Coney Island if you want you can still have the characters just refer to it as New York City just kind of willfully pretend that you think New York City is just Coney Island when you're confused you're British so nobody's gonna get on your case about it maybe you could reveal it when the park closes at night it like becomes wizard in New York like that's where everyone goes to buy their wizard stuff and hang out with wizards so you don't have to compete or invite comparison with Wizarding London but you're also just like casually totally making something a lot better like oh my god Ellie's nice and doesn't have a ferris wheel people love theme parks especially vintage ones like even if you're not there it's cool to look at them and hey you know it's easy to replicate for a Universal Studios theme park another theme park the ride concepts basically write themselves because they're just the rides number three the creatures didn't actually look that good this movie had like a lot of CGI a couple of the creatures looked fine I mean like the snake looked fine and the Rhino looked fine I don't know if that's because their skin is like easier to replicate or because they just had different lighting conditions but there was that one character than if Fleur who is basically just like an echidna and just looks like a fake echidna I get that you can't use a real animal really because it has to like have this range of emotions and do crazy stunts but I don't know something looked wrong maybe make it look less like a real animal or something like I very rarely felt like it was actually a thing in the same room as the actors also there was like a goblin and the Goblin was CGI was work Davis busy and you hate giving dwarves work was he at least like voiced by a dwarf since the movies so creature heavy this is again not an easy problem to fix I would say they could just use puppets or animatronics but that costs money and it's hard instead I think they should just pressure Joe to create creatures that are a lot like normal creatures Eddie redmayne's like it's a South it's a South Eastern scrub thumper is silly befuddled friend is like I don't know what that is Eddie redmayne's like well it's a cat but instead of - I just got a big Cyclops eye in the middle of its face just glued right on there just putty looks like putty but it's an eye that's part of the creature is that it looks fake and other creatures like an octopus that has oven mitts on its arms look out oh no if they absolutely don't want to cast a dwarf then they could just get a normal guy to be the Goblin he just walks in he just looks like a normal guy but the characters go it's a hideous Goblin he's gonna take all your money because he's a greedy goblin look at his scary pointy teeth just beady little eyes it's just a really unlucky extra that was on set that day number 4 the twists aren't really twists so I get that Harry Potter has an unfair advantage because it's a book and there's more in it so you can just seamlessly blend in clues with world building stuff and nobody knows that they're being fed clues so they don't figure stuff out as easily in a movie you say something to the audience and they go why did you say that to me and they start figuring stuff out Harry Potter also had Harry serving up some heavy confirmation bias in his narration so he'd say something happening and he would immediately start speculating to us about why that might be which is not the same as being an unreliable narrator by the way like that's not what that term means he's just a bad detective so Ezra Miller was obviously the obscure EO or obscurus obscuri Asst I feel like all of those are right and they each mean like different forms of the same word I've only seen the movie once so anyway it was obviously him because we were spending the most time with him everyone that was killed by the obscurus was shown wronging him and he was shown being angry about it and Newt had that line like usually they're 10 or younger which to me just like confirmed it because it was so obviously there to throw you off the scent the twist wasn't like oh my god he's the obscurus it was like why did Colin Farrell not know that he was the obscurus the twist was that Colin Farrell is dumb mom he was he watching speaking of Colin Farrell I knew he was going to Grindelwald and apparently there are a lot of like clues in posters that I didn't look at and in the visuals of the movie which I didn't see because for like the first 50% of any movie I'm just looking at my popcorn and enjoying eating the popcorn thinking about how I want to get a free refill on my large popcorn so like I didn't see any of the concrete evidence people have been talking about but I did notice that Colin Farrell seemed very evil and also that one time he just like just had a necklace of the Deathly Hallows logo I got this for you at Hot Topic esra and it's gonna make you feel better by alerting your mom that you're sympathetic to magic users so that she'll beat you more so allow me to fix this my twist is that Colin Farrell is a good guy and he just makes dumb decisions sometimes and it's not his fault he's trying his best you guys his wife just had a baby and he isn't getting a lot of sleep and that baby's name is Madame Rose Mirta Madame is her first name and Rose Marta is her middle name and she goes by both of them what does it mean I don't know because there's no real connection but one character was related to another character whose name you've heard before and that means that's a twist mind blown number 5 Ezra Miller just oozes miserable slime from every part of his face I did really like the casting in this movie people are always like really mean to Eddie Redmayne and I feel like he's been good and everything I've seen him in maybe not good but he's tried really hard I like when actors just like try really hard even if they're in a really stupid movie I don't know who any of these other people are but they like worked as their characters Tina was probably my favorite character and I think Ezra Miller is great Ezra Miller also gives it his all when he's crying he just whatever he's crying you see like a trail of liquid coming out of his face you can't tell if it's from his eyes or his nose or his mouth it's just really gross to look at just a trail of slime from some some I get that if you can cry really intensely and unselfconsciously as an actor and just push slime out of your face that that means you're a really good actor but it's gross and if I was the director I would just say like just don't do that Ezra don't do that please just don't do that that's my solution number six I have one problem with the casting so I just said I liked the casting in this movie and there's one notable exception and it's bad enough that you probably already know who I'm talking about so as I said before I figured out pretty early on that Colin Farrell is Grindelwald and I was kind of like yeah this is good this is perfect good actor good-looking face get it Dumbledore and I liked Voldemort but now we have a villain who's like a little subtler he's very reserved and you kind of feel some humanity from him they're like he very much believes in his ends justifying his means and then like a real-life horror movie his face melts away and reveals this leering heavily made-up Johnny Depp face he's all looking like a bleached out vengeful clown I'm a very reactive film watcher and I was just like no that wasn't even alone here I heard a bunch of other people like groaning someone booed the guy behind me was like oh come on like yeah I agree like not to be mean but I'm kind of like Dumbledore endangered the whole Wizarding World for this he looks like when judge doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit turned into a tune but then when they're like he's a tune he like turns to them and goes actually incredibly I'm supposed to just be a normal man I know people have always given Johnny Depp a hard time for being over-the-top and I've always been one of those idiots that's like well he's good as Jack Sparrow though leave him alone but like it's kind of awkward watching someone like mug and and flail around and do silly voices when he allegedly punches his wife in the face and verifiably has like kicking screaming violent wine-bottle throwing tantrums drunk in like the morning like you see him in Finding Neverland and you're like oh he never grew up and then you see him in the leaked footage and you're like oh my god he never grew up it's awkward cuz like this is a done deal like even if people react poorly you can't just write out Grindelwald he's already like the big bad guy for this time period well as always I've got a solution so fantastic beasts to which I hope is called the monster book of monsters clearly the better textbook there's like an establishing scene of Grindelwald in Wizard Jail it shows his face and his face morphs from Johnny Depp into Colin Farrell or like another actor its disguises on disguises now that's a good twist number 7 the stakes are extremely low so until the Grindelwald twist our main villain is the orphan raising witch hating muggle lady I was like that's cool we never have muggle villains in Harry Potter and then I was like oh the reason we don't have muggle villains and Harry Potter is that muggles can't do anything to wizards I mean I guess the Dursleys hurt Harry psychologically witch haters have Salem in the name which I assume is supposed to be scary but canonically and Harry Potter the witch is getting burned at the stake in Salem we're just casting tickling charms on themselves and we're impervious to the flame and thought it was funny so that kind of detracts from the seriousness of the threat the high-stakes scene is when Tina and nu are about to get straight-up melted in acid and that was weird cuz you're like oh I guess in the American ministry just one guy in a little cubicle can be like execute this former agent and also do it right now and it doesn't need to be approved by anybody and we'll just be unquestioningly carried out by nice people who both knew and liked the suspect like why did Tina want to go back to working there at the end of the movie did this not make things awkward actually there's a lot at the ministry that doesn't make sense Wizards can't let muggles find out about Wizards because it would like upset the status quo the muggles would like hurt their own feelings if they knew the truth like I get that the initial widespread panic would be like bad news for everybody but it's just hard to be nervous when Newt is like in the bank or the jewelry store when you know that if he was really in trouble he could just magic himself out of whatever bind he's gotten himself into and then erased the memories of everybody remembers it I guess if it's a lot of muggles that would take a long time that's inconvenient this would be really bad if information could spread exponentially in seconds like via the Internet but fortunately it's set in the 1920s so that's not an issue I like the end when the Wizard president is just like oh no we can't erase all these muggles memory there's like a thousand of them and like a hundred of us and I'm tired I'm just all gonna die but it turns out there's a fix for that too nute like gets out his giant eagle it's like Buckbeak but it's not a horse so it's less special newt goes like i was gonna wait until he got him to his natural habitat it's not a big deal just on i'm at now and then majestic music plays and we watch a whole montage about how newts entire journey was pointless he didn't need to come to America and the movie didn't need to happen cuz I guess that eagle would have been fine anywhere so now let's fix this we know that muggle witch hater lady doesn't pose a threat to our wizards but she can still be scary because she is dangerous to all the orphans that are under her thumb there they could have just played that up a little more to do so they'd want to develop more of the kids personalities than just as Remillard like as many as possible would be ideal either give them all silly New Yorker accents to make them more endearing maybe have like one of the short ones have to get around on a crutch so people feel more sympathy for him then give these kids their own agency have them expressed discontent with the situation that they're in and try to get out of it give them dreams maybe one of them wants to go out west which is a beautiful parallel to how Eddie Redmayne wants to get his Eagle out west at Arizona these kids are resourceful and eventually one of them has the idea to start a union until they get benefits they are not passing out anymore pamphlets the witch hater is furious because with all these kids on strike she can't keep telling people how witches are evil now maybe the director can add in some singing and dancing to make this all more stimulating the witch hater boughs to the pressure and gives him to the kids demands and then immediately afterward she is killed by an obscure E Oh anyway those are my solutions I mean the good news is we're getting more wizard movies I think the sequels could be really fun so is ending on an extended Newsies joke like a bad call because I could kind of feel while it was happening that it was a bad call but I couldn't stop myself and I'm gonna leave it in I can feel it that's everything bye the moral of this movie is that you should protect wildlife and their rights but if they can help you in some way just put them in New York they'll be fine they already owe you for saving them so even if he gets hit by a plane karmically you're coming out on top Accio biased review

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 686,163

Rating: 4.902915 out of 5

Keywords: fantastic beasts and where to find them, harry potter, j k rowling

Id: EMRnG_mtosY

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/topdeck55]

She's trapped in the cinemasins "forced to nitpick because that's my shtick" whirlpool now.

[u/zackogenic]

I feel like the dumbest sap for not knowing who the Obscurus was.

[u/NightofSloths]

Ending on an extended Newsies joke was definitely the right call.

[u/IngloriousBlaster]

She's pretty

[u/primus202]

I loved the setting. The characters were fun. The production value was amazing. However the story felt lacking in parts. Especially because it was so apparent everything was really just working towards setting up this new part of the universe for future films. Most of the actual plot specific to this film felt forced, painted on, or just didn't have any stakes. The way the big bad was nullified so quickly without apparently having any real impact on anything was very underwhelming.