News Reporter: Act Four: Okay, fine, I'm excited for 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them'

Friday 30 September 2016

Act Four: Okay, fine, I'm excited for 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them'

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Eddie Redmayne in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” which is scheduled for release on Nov. 18. (Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Pictures via Associated Press)

For the past couple of years, I’ve been feeling increasingly peevish about J.K. Rowling’s inability to stop messing with her “Harry Potter” series, whether she’s been retroactively making the series more progressive in ways she didn’t have the courage to do the first time out or churning out supplemental material. In my defense, some of these products, like the poorly written, psychologically thin “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” are simply not very good.

But because it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, and because I think critics should be honest with you when their feelings shift, I have to admit that the full trailer for “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” a spin-off series to be set decades before the events of the “Harry Potter” books and movies, got me genuinely excited for the movie. Just when I thought I was out–well, you know how the quote goes.

It helps that it looks like “Fantastic Beasts” is going to work with some of the ideas I found interesting in the “Harry Potter” series that never got much play, among them the relationship between the mundane and magical communities. The idea of successive British prime ministers getting briefed on the existence of magic was a great idea, but one necessarily executed in a brief way. Now, it looks like we’ll see how magic, carelessly executed, could influence a U.S. presidential election. (It’s also interesting to think of people with magical abilities as a minority in the American context.)

But it also makes me feel like Rowling and her collaborators finally trust that their universe is interesting enough without the hook of the Boy Who Lived. And that ability to move beyond initial conflicts and characters is what makes for a truly great and long-lasting fictional universe, whether the Star Wars novels and games and TV shows were leaving Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and in some cases even the fascination with Jedi Knights behind, or whether “Star Trek” was being revitalized with each successive crew. It’s often felt like J.K. Rowling was tinkering — or tampering — with near-perfection. Now, I have hope again that she’s finally ready for an entirely new adventure in the world she gave us.