Film Review - Fantastic Beasts (2016)

Fantastic Beasts is the new Harry Potter spinoff written by JK Rowling and directed by David Yates who did the last few Potter films and the story here concerns Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) who comes to America from England with a special suitcase filled with Magical Creatures but when some of them escape through a chance encounter Percival Graves (Colin Farrell) goes to investigate but his investigation may uncover much more.

I hated this movie, I hated sitting through it for these reasons:

- Firstly the story here written by Rowling herself no less is all over the place, at times it feels like it's trying to do its own thing but at the same time if you have any knowledge of the Harry Potter series and I have some but I'm not an uber fan of it then it also began to feel very predictable as you could put together the clues of where all of these elements are eventually going to end up as well as predicting what's going to happen in this new series of stories.

- Secondly most of the characters I just found to be utterly boring and I didn't really care about most of them, I did like Newt and was very interested in following him and his story but so often the focus shifts away from him to these other characters like a pair of Sisters who use magic and a Muggle that gets caught up in the events of the story and I didn't really care about them all that much I wanted to see more of Newt.

- And lastly Yates's direction here is awful, it became clear to me when thinking about the film after I saw it that his focus was clearly divided between this and Tarzan which he also made earlier this year and frankly he should've abandoned Tarzan for another filmmaker and put his full focus onto this film as his Potter films were actually pretty good and again the whole thing plays out with a CGI thingamajig in the climax and so much of the film looks dark and murky and at times the action is hard to follow as it gets very blurry at times.

And so that was Fantastic Beasts and I was not that impressed with this one but if you're a Potterhead frankly what I say will be pointless as you'll want to see it for yourself and I will not stand in your way one little bit, 1 out of 5.