Newt's Ark

Rating: 1/10 (27 November 2016)

David Yates has done it again - what a terrible movie. Boring from beginning to end. J.K. Rowling just wasn't able to write a script that could live up to the Harry Potter books and universe. Fantastic? Not so much. Beasts? Sure, lots of them, but uninteresting. Where to find them? All inside a magical bag. There's absolutely no character development: we get to know very little about Newt Scamander, his personal quest, his thoughts or what drives him; Tina is just bland; and Kowalski is a comic relief that just wasn't necessary. Throughout the movie, you never understand why Newt has a "Noah complex" or why he was driven to build his own Ark of magical creatures; there's no tension, no drama involved - muggles don't know about those creatures, so they can't hate them or understand how dangerous they might be, and wizards just don't seem to care enough about them. Why exactly was Newt expelled from Hogwarts? What exactly was his relation to Leta Lestrange? We just don't know. Graves was an interesting character, but very poorly developed. Sure, he is revealed to be something more and we couldn't know too much, but we never get to understand the context in which he professes his ideology. For a movie that revolves around magic, there's actually not that much magic being used during the movie. Maybe next time they should try a movie with less special effects and a little bit more acting. The Harry Potter books were always about the narrative - well written, enticing, thrilling, focused on big existential issues, such as death, the quest for immortality, friendship. This movie was about the visual power of cinema, and that just isn't enough. Besides, a whole generation grew up with Harry Potter, a generation that actually "grew up", so a PG movie won't work.