I thought when I walked into Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that I already knew pretty much the whole storyline from the previews. I was wrong. The previews don’t even touch on the story. They and the movie itself set you up to make you think you know what’s happening. You think you know (or at least, I did) what kind of creature is terrorizing New York City. I was so wrong. What it was was far more intense than I had imagined.
J. K. Rowling wrote the entire screenplay herself. She didn’t give her world over and let someone else do the work, and it shows. She created an entire new concept that harmonizes perfectly with her existing series. To my delight, the movie caters to people who have read the books. It shows you things from the books that were left out of the movies—things you probably thought you’d never get to see.
Fantastic Beasts relies on you being very familiar with the British Wizarding world, and then it takes you and drops you smack dab into an environment, along with the main character, Newt, that it knows you are a stranger in: Wizarding America in the 1920s. It’s supposed to be shocking, and it works. You have no idea what’s going on and neither does he, so you learn together. If you enter this movie and you have no concept of the Wizarding world whatsoever, you’re going to be very, very lost, and not even Newt will be able to help you much there. In fact, you’ll probably feel very much like the “No-Maj” character, Jacob.
The film also expects you to have certain preconceived notions about things so it can break them down. It expects you to feel a certain way about certain types of magic, based on the people you have seen use them in the future. It expects you to think yourself an expert on how a certain type of magical creature lives, only to sweep the rug out from under you. It wants you to feel that Wizarding America in the 1920s is a very different place from Wizarding Britain in the 1990s. Those nuances are only accessible to people who have at least watched the other movies before, and they are what take Fantastic Beasts beyond just a great movie and make it a work of art.
This movie expects you to be familiar with some of the history and politics of the Wizarding world. It expects you to remember why the International Statute of Secrecy came to be. (Hint: Just ask Hermione.) It expects you to already be familiar with Wizard Hitler. (Hint: It wasn’t Voldemort and you’ll have to sit through Harry Potter until the last film if you don’t already know.) You should already know what Wizard Hitler stood for and why it was so easy for him to convince people to his side.
Fantastic Beasts is also very aware that the majority of your experience within the Wizarding world has been from inside a school, and it wants you to know it’s time to join the adult world now, and that that is a scary place. This is about a world about to go to war, and there is a sense of their being very ill-equipped to deal with it. You’ll find there are just as many issues within MACUSA as there are within the Ministry of Magic, and we are introduced to some fascinating new villains and situations. This is meant to be one giant culture shock, but Newt is the perfect character to hold your hand through it. He is warm, relatable, and caring, while taking almost a neutral view to the human world and its politics. Newt is no Gryffindor, and it’s actually very refreshing to have a story told by a Hufflepuff, two American Witches, and a No-Maj. It’s a very different perspective from what we’re used to. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.
