The Many Failures of Fantastic Beasts

you know what I love Harry Potter it's pretty much the quintessential fiction story of my generation and it's almost impossible to meet someone around my age who isn't intimately familiar with the story it's honestly hard to sum up the emotional impact of something as enormous as this franchise the books the film's The Wizarding World is so vast and ever-expanding that it's kind of hard to keep track of and in some cases the franchise makes me actively not want to keep track of it but most of the less appealing aspects of Harry Potter's world came after his story that story to find a generation of readers and went on to be burned into public consciousness for the foreseeable future but as the franchise around that story has continued beyond it it's undergone a very noticeable dip in quality and not just from a more critical adult perspective on children's books the Harry Potter books are great books a casual they can see is a good book JK Rowling is generally a good writer so what's going on fantastic beasts the crimes of Grindelwald was among my least favorite movies of 2018 I didn't expect much from it and it still let me down more than I ever could have imagined there are a lot of factors to that almost all of them stemming from the horrendous screenplay but this new iteration of the Harry Potter franchise is flawed from the ground up the continuation of the franchise was inevitable I knew seeing that train pull away 19 years later wasn't really the end but I expected something better than this it is said that I hate no magic [Music] accounts fell so I want to explore this series so far and discuss why it's fallen apart so quickly despite the fact that there are allegedly three more of these films on the way which is honestly starting to feel a bit like a threat the world around Harry Potter is one of the most fascinating in contemporary fantasy especially considering that we only see a microcosm of it across his seven stories lots of supplemental material after the books have helped to flush this world out and the fantastic beast films had the chance to bring some of those ideas to life the first movie does a decent job of this by placing the focus mainly on magical creatures as well as introducing some new spells and wizard variants like the obscurus which is fairly interesting what made Harry Potter story so compelling is that he was thrust into a completely new and almost entirely imagined world hogwarts came to feel like a real tangible place through only his perspective but with fantastic beasts the stories are rooted in pretty normal environments sure they're in the 1920s that's something but it's still mostly just New York or Paris people are running around these environments casting spells but that's not what made the world of Harry Potter engaging it was the world and sure we see that wizards speakeasy and the Wizards Circus and explored the kusa a bit but that was somehow aesthetically less interesting than the Ministry of Magic like a decade ago it doesn't feel like The Wizarding World is actually being expanded it feels like wizards are being put into real-world locations which creates a very different feeling towards those locations and we never needed that with Harry Potter we never needed Hogwarts to have a Starbucks for us to understand it the writing made us care the characters bond with it made us care and then there's the creatures which also aren't particularly special I sure do love the Rhino and the Platypus and the monkey and the bird and the twig Aled bent I do like the Cthulhu horse and some creatures have interesting designs but most of them are just combinations of existing animals animals with exaggerated features where's the imagination where's the creativity we have a whole world to explore and we barely see it I get the idea of setting stories in the muggle world and showing how Wizards had to struggle to keep themselves secret but they do such a bad job it's hard to believe they would be able to stay secret for so long and I also get that because these characters aren't children they don't need the world explained to them every step of the way and frankly given the popularity of Harry Potter neither does the audience I just figured that a series named after the Wizarding World would spend a little more time in the Wizarding World instead we've got a lot of cobblestone streets adventure to continue on the idea of expansion I was really interested to see what new characters and conflicts could arise from new Wizarding World stories especially in different time periods there are so many social and political factors to play with and you could explore how those factors functioned in the Wizarding World and how the cultural separation between the wizarding world and the muggle world was defined through time instead the conflict revolves around a shy protagonist who's trying to find his place in the world his comic relief best friend who loves food his hyper capable female friend and ambiguous love interest and a quirky blonde this protagonist has a tendency to conflict with the Wizarding government and is directly opposing a dangerous wizard who wants to conquer the world in a loose Nazi allegory in order to defeat this evil wizard the heroes have to destroy a magical object at the evil wizard created when he was younger to protect himself sound familiar obviously I'm simplifying things a bit but in all of history of all the possible characters that could have been imagined these films aren't really attempting anything that new the characters have some different points of definition but the only difference that feels significant is that again they're adults and not contained inside Hogwarts the emotional conflicts between them are still pretty shallow though and don't exactly garner a lot of sympathy especially with Queenie's character the separation between the magical and non magical world is defined through her and her relationship with Jacob man she enchanted to fall in love with her then she joins up with a mass-murderer because she wants to marry whoever she wants man the politics of this series are bizarre also there's Tina who's mostly just kind of there the movies can't seem to decide if she's going to have a relationship with Newt or not and I really don't care there's a certain emptiness to these new films they lack the human spark of the Harry Potter series despite the fact that they have so much more potential to explore the nostalgic connection to Harry Potter is undeniably the most important part of why people connect with it but you can still write a good script for adults you're allowed to do that JK Rowling funnily enough even though these stories are coming from the same main creative voice of Harry Potter it feels like a pale imitation trying desperately to recapture the magic of the original series again do you think it's a coincidence that the heroes now have to destroy a magical object so they can fight the big evil wizard I don't on top of all that there's the way these movies look and feel David Yates is using the same dark grungy aesthetic that he brought to the later Harry Potter films but it just makes the fantastic beast films feel lifeless the style doesn't reinforce any thematic darkness or maturity so it just feels like they're trying to recapture the atmosphere of the later Harry Potter films without their emotional context the best comparison I can think of is between the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit these new films don't know if they are stylistically their own story or part of a bigger story so they're doing both and neither are working I've expressed my dislike of prequels a lot in the past but to quickly recap my biggest problem with them as a storytelling device is that they serve primarily to answer questions that don't really need to be answered or in other cases serve to recontextualize establish story elements in a way that makes them feel stupider in retrospect often undermining the impact they originally had watch me I'll do the fingering this may not be the biggest problem with these films which would be the fact that they're just very boring but it's still very present especially in the crimes of Grindelwald usually in prequels when a character is related to a significant character from the original work it means something but not here if Leda was an actual character in her own right the name connection could be seen as less important but she's not she just kind of looks vaguely sad all the time and then she just dies almost like she was nothing more than a shallow emotional prop for Newt and his brother nice she doesn't add any new dimensions to the Lestrange family except to show that they're kind of evil which we knew already and it just makes the world feel smaller I guess the Wizarding World especially the British Wizarding World is limited and the pureblood families are all kind of incest II but Leda has nothing to do with any of that her role is actually as part of a ridiculously convoluted back story involving a secret baby switch onboard a sinking ship that may have been the Titanic which is causing this other guy to hunt down Ezra Miller who was exploded but also survived and the reason she swapped the babies was because the original baby was crying too much that all might sound stupid and that's because it is then there's the relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald which presented a really good opportunity for a heart-wrenching emotional story in this world and a new way to understand who Dumbledore is but we can't have that relationship in the movie we've got to sell tickets and gay Wizards don't sell tickets that's the oldest rule in Hollywood everyone knows it so they vaguely tease that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were close and something was going on and they were closer than brothers which culminated in a magical locket that prevents Dumbledore from being able to fight Grindelwald because they need a story for the next movie I guess fantastic beasts the locket breakers in theaters 2021 we had to push it back but not because the last one flopped we swear also it turns out that Ezra Miller has actually Dumbledore secret brother I'm still processing the abysmal stupidity of that one they'll be honest or maybe he's not and maybe it's all a lie that Grindelwald fed him so they can have another twist at the end of the next movie I guess I certainly hope so because considering the established timeline of Dumbledore's life it makes absolutely no sense and of course there's the crown jewel of terrible prequel storytelling my new standard for idiocy Nagini you know when I was reading the Harry Potter books and watching the movies I never once thought what's the snakes backstory I'm truly shocked that Nagini is a character at all in these new movies and even more shocked that I'm expected to care about her am I supposed to feel bad about her snake disease am I supposed to care about her relationship with Ezra Miller am I supposed to wonder when Voldemort is gonna show up movie 5 that's my guest by the way and why are Wizards so impressed that she can turn into a snake wizards can just learn how to turn into animals if they want when you compare the level of blatant fan service between fantastic beasts 1 & 2 it's clear the movies can't decide whether they're supposed to function as prequels or as a new story and that all stems from one thing overall I think one of the greatest strengths of the Harry Potter series is that it just ended there was a definitive point where the story had to end it was established the story would end by that point and it did it wasn't inflated or padded it just happened and ended and then it ended again on film a few years later but my point still stands it was inevitable that future stories in this franchise would emulate the Harry Potter series as much as possible not just for the sake of nostalgia but because there was an established structure and formula that had worked amazingly well once so why not again just look at Harry Potter and the cursed child a convoluted mess of a script that's apparently a pretty solid play when you see it in person but who has the money for that that play script was marketed as the definitive 8th story as the official continuation of this series but it was stuck in the past literally and figuratively it's basically just a recap of Harry Potter's greatest hits but from an outsider's perspective it feels like bad fanfiction not a Harry Potter story but the play is never able to tell a Harry Potter story because it's so focused on trying to give Harry Potter fans what they want but what they want can't come simply from replication and now we have the fantastic beast movies which started off promising since they clearly weren't trying to use the Harry Potter brand that blatantly and seemed to be going in a new direction but then the crimes of Grindelwald came along and Hogwarts is back can Dumbledore's back and the Elder Wand is back remember that kids do you like these movies yet or do we have to have Harry Potter's grandparents show up in fantastic beasts the locket breakers I wouldn't be shocked these films don't function as a new story because they're stuck trying to fit Harry Potter lore into them where it doesn't belong Plus this series jumped from one film to five really quickly in production so we have to fill some time and what better way to do that then pandering so now double doors in the movie but why Newt Scamander has no place in the story of Dumbledore and Grindelwald I really don't know why he's there besides maintaining continuity through the fantastic beast brand you can tell by the tonal dissonance between the Newt being wacky with magical beast scenes and the Dumbledore and Grindelwald drama scenes that they don't really mix even that title is so awkward and clunky just pick a story and tell it that's a problem with any franchise like this they just keep doing what worked before but what works before isn't necessarily going to work again especially considering Harry Potter's unique place in history the audience of Harry Potter grew up with those characters their perspectives on life evolved with those characters the connection came from a place of understanding and relatability and in wanting to be a part of that world but that kind of creative insight doesn't matter anymore the bottom line is keeping this franchise alive until they inevitably remake the Harry Potter story probably as a Netflix series or something and if you think that'll never happen at least not soon I wish I had your optimism what happened JK Rowling went from one of the most beloved authors on the planet to one of the most I roll worthy for a number of reasons in terms of storytelling within this universe I don't know what's wrong maybe it's because she has complete creative control in a medium of writing she's not that familiar with and she refuses to accept help or delegate maybe she doesn't know what the fans want out of this franchise and is trying to recapture what worked about the original story to appease them maybe she hates Harry Potter now and is determined to ruin his legacy by diluting the brand with progressively dumber information until the end of time a lack of understanding is my best guess whether of screenwriting or of her own franchise these films have no lasting stakes all of the huge climactic destruction is just undone and everyone keeps going about their business with no consequences Oh No Lidl estranged died I'm heartbroken her character was so interesting also because these movies are prequels I know the Wizarding World isn't going to be exposed because decades later in the timeline it still isn't still how have Wizards kept magical creatures like this under wraps for so long where do they all live why don't people have to say when they cast spells anymore who gave Johnny Depp that haircut whatever the reason for the loss of quality in her writing it's just kind of a bummer to know that the main creative force behind such a significant piece of culture can't keep it going forever this certainly isn't the first time it's happened and it won't be the last but this is why I believe good stories should end but that sentiment doesn't fall in line with studio thinking and despite the fact that almost all of them are crap they keep making prequel spin-offs prequel spin-offs are the worst kind of movies just to stop the fantastic beast films are not good and the main reason why they're not good is because they can't step out of the shadow of the story that allowed them to exist they're not retro actively ruining the Harry Potter story for me but I think they are damaging to the brand because of all their wasted potential the wasted potential is what really kills me because the world of Harry Potter is so right for this kind of exploration and also future generations deserve fantasy stories like Harry Potter they deserve to be captivated by magical worlds and characters how many kids picked up sticks in their backyards and use them as wands to cast spells and make their own Wizarding World stories with their friends I remember doing that I'm sure many people do that was years ago when I still went outside but nothing in the fantastic beasts movies inspires that kind of love or devotion maybe the franchise can still turn back around but I think the foundation is almost irreparably flawed I can't say that I'm looking forward to the next movie or that I'll even watch it but I hope it can get back to what made this franchise so appealing in the first place it'll never make us feel like kids again on the other hand it shouldn't have to but somewhere in the middle it could at least not be embarrassing so guys those are some of my thoughts on the fantastic beast movies so far thank you so much for watching this video if you liked it feel free to give it a like and subscribe if you want to see more thanks again and I'll see you next time

Channel: undefined

Views: 369,314

Rating: 4.6200404 out of 5

Keywords: ross mcintyre, fantastic beasts review, fantastic beasts, the crimes of grindelwald, fantastic beasts sucks

Id: 7ypnJs5KkPo

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2019