Fantastic Beasts and Where to find them: Meh. Since a new one is coming out I thought I would finally see the first. It really should be up my alley, a fun story of a goofy bumbling scientist that cares about crazy creatures but it doesn't really work, for two big reasons. But! It's not a bad film, just meh. First is that it feels like two different movies. It feels like a story of loose beasts that need to be captured because of the bumbling scientist, and a political story about the witching world, glued onto it because some didn't think the hunting creatures aspect was enough. This means we don't really get much development on the political characters and I don't know why I should care or not about them. So it seems like a movie that might be more enjoyed by those that've read all the material and understand some of the background better.
The second issue is the scale of the monsters that are being chased down. Some of these things are utter destruction and chaos, and some are just goofy little critters and that they are all kept under the same half locked case. If they were all found in the time period of the movie then there's no way they could have stayed secret and not known by the muggle world. Where as in a book it's much easier to play up the nerding about each creature so medium and lesser destructive creatures could be described with aww. In a movie, either it's cute, goofy and puppy like, or it's big and massive, because anything inbetween doesn't phase post 'throw all the shit at the screen' transformers era movies.
Also can we talk about
:
What kind of archaic authoritarian (or ham-fisted writer) system is the Wizardry community?! Sentenced to death for letting muggles see, by one judge guy, with no appeal, to be carried out immediately, no last meal, just off to the back room for ya! Where we then find out they don't even just death zap spell them because that would be 'evil' oh no, they pull out your happiest memories and toss them into a vision pond that convinces you to walk into black acid lava under your own volition so that you are in fact happy you are killing yourself. How is this normal procedure? Especially since we know there are whole big high security magic prisons for the craziest and most violent wizards. Either something's out of balance here or Azkaban is actually full of people who littered or ran a magical red light.