Solid Spin Off

Rating: 8/10 (8 April 2019)

Fantastic Beasts is a spinoff of Harry Potter, in a universe now known as the Wizarding World. The Harry Potter series has a huge amount of content beside the story of the title character and his friends, namely, the fascinating and developed world it's set it. With a whole world of wizards that has existed within our own, there's a whole host of different options to explore this world. It begins with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the story of Newt Scamander, a British wizard who comes to America in search of a Thunderbird in Arizona but is stuck in New York after his beasts are let loose in the city. It follows him on his misadventures as he finds his loose creatures, which leads into some much bigger problems.
What's interesting about this movie is that we see how the Wizarding World works aside from life at Hogwarts and in the Ministry of Magic. By having it set in America, neither of those things have a strong presence in the movie, although they are, along with Dumbledore, name dropped in the movie. Here we have MAGUSA (Magical Congress of the United States of America) serving in the place of the Ministry of Magic. It focuses on the grown-up Wizarding World, as opposed to seeing the school of magic. Because of that, it still feels like the world of Harry Potter, albeit from a much different angle. The setting of New York City in the 1920s was done very well, from the excellent costume design to the look and feel of the city and its buildings. Additionally, you have the MAGUSA and some other magical places that have the same magic as the Ministry of Magic and Diagon Alley, but with a much different aesthetic. This movie succeeds because it's not a Harry Potter movie, it's a movie set in the Wizarding World. The beasts are, well, fantastic. One of the movie's biggest strengths is that the creatures of this world are spectacular beings, as one would indicate given the title. They give off that sense of wonder and mystery that the Wizarding World has succeeded in.
The characters, on the other hand, aren't as interesting as they were before. Newt is played pretty well by Eddie Redmayne, but his character isn't particularly interesting. What he does is more interesting than he himself. This is, however, movie number one in the series, so give it time. Tina is in the same boat, but the audience can relate to her and her struggles. Jacob is a comic relief, and a pretty good one at that. The jokes about him being a muggle (or no-maj, apparently) entering the wizarding world is relatable, because that's how someone would act if they stumbled into this world. Speaking of, there's the whole ordeal with the Second Salem people. The whole anti-wizard part was interesting to think about from the idea of having this be what would happen if there really was an underground world of magic users. Credence was pretty cool, although that treads into spoiler territory. The ending was kind of dumb, though.
Fantastic Beasts is a solid spin-off. It also gets credit because in an age where many sequels and prequels, like Force Awakens and Jurassic World, are essentially carbon copies of the originals. This could easily have been about little Newt going off to Hogwarts like in Sorcerer's Stone. It explores the world more thoroughly, which is its best aspect. It really isn't as good as most of the main Harry Potter movies, but it's a solid movie in its own right. But as the first movie in the series, it did what it had to. It gave us a good time, and left us interested in what's to come.