Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
I'm not really sure what to make of this film. I'm not the biggest Harry Potter fan in the world- ie, i've seen the films but gave up the books about a hundred pages into Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, so had no real anticipation for a new series of films set in the same universe as Potter but decades earlier.
This film is littered with references to the world of Potter which was quite nice but it's also stand alone enough as to not alienate anybody completely new. Eddie Redmayne was terrific as Newt and made me wish he'd been cast as the 13th Doctor, as was Alison Sudol, in fact all the cast, from Katherine Waterston and Dan Fogler to Colin Farrell, were uniformly excellent, well rounded and beautifully written. Even the smaller fantastic beasts were lovely creations which left me wishing the story had properly centred round them.
Where the film fell apart for me was in what i suppose were really classed as the show stopping set pieces as large cloudy squiggles decimated twenties New York City. I was bored to tears, it's nothing new in the film world of the 21st century and i found it all tedious in the extreme.
Once the CGI shit was done with we were left with a genuinely sweet ending as the characters went their own ways which left me with a smile on my face but also skewed my thinking that the film was better than it actually was. A good first 45 minutes and a very good last ten minutes with a lot of nonsense in between.
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