You may remember that two years ago, I had very unflattering things to say about Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, allegedly a “spin-off” from and “prequel” to the Harry Potter films, but more honestly an attempt at squeezing a few bajillion more dimes out of J.K. Rowling’s now-classic YA series. To paraphrase Sarah Silverman in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, I wouldn’t watch movies like it free time, but it seems to make so many people money.
Well, fast forward to now, and what do you know, I’m here wishing for something as merely not good as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, as opposed to its follow-up, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which is, almost without argument, the single worst franchise prequel ever made, a movie so disastrously bad, so straightforwardly incompetent, that it may actually have some influence over how I feel about the films and stories it precedes. It’s terrible.
I’m a Potter geek, so of course what sticks out to me most about this movie is its perspective. The Harry Potter movies benefit from their vantage point, which the Fantastic Beasts movies completely ignore in favor of humdrum adult vantage points, which is a bad, bad decision.
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