Why you should watch Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

The film, starring Eddie Redmayne as magical zoologist Scamander, is a spinoff of the massively popular J.K. Rowling series that takes place in the same wizarding world as Potter, but decades before the Boy Who Lived was ever conjured up. The magic of the movie is that it entices us that there is a whole magical world out there that is yet to be discovered and peaks our curiosity of the possibilities of other wizarding communities that are closer to home.

For comparison, the newest Harry Potter movie, 2011’s Deathly Hallows Part 2, made $169.1 million in the United States during its opening weekend. This movie is meant to be the springboard for five more films in its genre.

In addition to everything there is to see and do outside, inside the giant-screen Imax theater, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” will be screened in 3D. Set in 1926, it centers on Newt Scamander, a “magizoologist” who arrives in NY with a case full of unusual creatures that quickly escape.

It’s hard not to compare Fantastic Beasts to the Potter films even though nearly everything about them is different besides their shared world.

Rowling has a voluminous imagination and Yates keeps things humming along, although, as was also true of many “Potter” movies, there is often too much of a good thing.

The movie stars Oscar victor Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander who tries to retrieve magical creatures that have escaped from his valise and have wreaked havoc in 1926 New York City. As the movie drags on, however, he looks more comfortable while wandering the streets of New York City looking for his creatures.

“This movie felt kind of charmless”, Alonso Duralde said. The director of the movie is David Yates who also directed the four “Harry Potter” movies.

Newt is soon joined by muggle Jacob (Dan Fogler) and witches Tina and Queenie Goldstein (Katherine Waterston and Alison Sudol). It would’ve been better if less time were spent on getting reacquainted with everything and more on pushing the story forward, but the promise of future Beasts installments is, to be perfectly cheesy, fantastic.