I'm going to be honest: I'm a bad millennial.
That is to say that I never really enjoyed Harry Potter as much as a lot of people I know--not the books, not the movies. I had to wait a long time to read and watch them and... well, they're good, but they didn't live up to the hype for me.
The thing that went most strongly in the series' favor, for me, was the expansive world which Rowling seemed to have set Harry Potter to his fate within, and the extensive backstory which was only briefly touched on. Essentially, for me, even when I was young, I felt like I was reading a book about New York as told by a child who only ever stayed in and around his apartment. That is, there were whole other worlds out there, but they were left aside for the concerns of the protagonist.
And don't get me started on Harry. The more I read, the more frustrated I became with Harry. I have little affinity for any of the characters in the books, but of them the one I am most like is Hermione. Of course, I knew that, so I couldn't understand how Hermione put up with Harry throughout the books. Dumbledore, too, was painfully nonsensical in his plans. I decided halfway through the fifth book that Dumbledore was actually just a crazy, well-meaning, and ludicrously powerful old wizard.
Which is all fine. They're good books and well-shot, impressively acted movies. I was just let down: by the fact that Rowling would keep even large portions of the last books at Hogwarts, and the fact that Harry is unnecessarily annoying for a huge portion of the books (not the first two, which was nice).
Well, Fantastic Beasts fixed those problems. It was set in New York, for one.
As a movie, it also didn't suffer from the difficulty that the earlier ones had. It didn't have to adapt a book. Even though the HP series did it better than 99% of the other book-to-movie adaptations out there, there were still huge portions of the books taken out, some of them fairly important to the image that the reader received of certain characters. For instance, Hermione's impassioned defense of house elves, which is a long and consistent subplot throughout the books, had to be cut almost in its entirety for the movies. Which is fine. It just changes things.
Fantastic Beasts didn't have that problem. It was fun, fast-paced, and funny. The villains were good, the plot twist, while obvious for a regular moviegoer, was not painfully so, and the heroes, Newt Scamander, sisters Tina and Queenie Goldstein, and Muggle/No-Maj Jacob Kowalski, were all relatable, clever, and decidedly not fifteen, a disease from which Harry suffered through one of his books and the symptoms of which were present in all of them.
Not to mention that it didn't take away from any of the adventure, brilliant acting, and sweeping universe the others had--in short, it had all the things I loved in them, and fixed all of the problems.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was released worldwide Nov. 18, 2016. I wholly endorse you going to see it.
