If I saw this as a pre-teen, back when HP ended and we were all starving for new content, I would have really loved this movie. JKR has a lot of flaws, but I think this movie shows her very specific talent, which is in creating details. Details like weird magical inventions, charming and memorable names and peculiar and endearing visual gags and tricks. She's really not a big picture writer, but she does do good in enriching the magical world and making it feel alive. I liked the new setting of the American ministry of magic, I liked the prohibitionism-era magical settings, I like the idea of seeing actual adults exist and live as wizards instead of kids, cause it can give us new perspectives. This movie had potential, and it irritates me how much of that potential is wasted.
Now, to the bad things:
- Fanservice: this is easy. For example, the references to Hogwarts and Dumbledore that are far too coincidental, the hippogriff-type creature, the newspaper title sequence basically copied from HP5, even the original theme, a piece of music literally titled after a character that doesn't exist yet.
- Overrelying on CGI: the movie has an aesthetics problem. The sets of the city, as vast as they are, look kind of fake. There's a lot of teleports, of scenes of destruction that don't look as impactful as they should. It feels like a movie set, or worst a huge green-screen room. The creatures look good but still artificial, and there are way too many creatures. The scenes inside the suitcase-zoo are completely CG and so visually messy, I don't understand where the characters are, it doesn't feel real.
- Too much magic: as weird as it sounds, I think that the HP stories were really mostly mystery stories based in a slight fantasy setting. This movie has a mystery, but it focuses more on action. There are teleportations happening every minute. Teleporting is a pretty cheap visual trick to make the fights feel more active, when in the HP books it was used sparingly, for long-distance movements. Also, again, buildings are destroyed every second with no casualties. But also Newt uses Reparo on a BUILDING by himself and fixes it. He uses Accio on living creatures (plot hole).
- Tonal inconsistency: the story follows a quirky zookeeper that tries to recover his magical zoo. But also: the story follows an abused 20-something-yo man that lives in a repressive household, being manipulated by someone that wants to weaponize the dark power of his trauma. The scenes will literally go from cute platypus stealing gold to death penalty to queenie flirting awkwardly with Jacob to abuse victim killing his own abuser and having basically a psychotic breakdown only to be tragically killed by the authorities. This is what happens when you take what should have been a single episodic story and you try to make it feel important. We have the Witch Hunters, a clear metaphor for repressive religious freaks, but also wizards have anti-reproduction laws to segregate wizards and humans, so basically both factions are nazi satire. Pretty weird considering how little JK tries to solve her Jew-Goblin problem in this film (literally the only Goblin we get to know is a sleazy animal trafficker that calls the cops on Newt to have the gold bounty). There's a lot of superficiality and shallow social commentary that doesn't go anywhere. It's all very jumbled and messy. Too many characters, too many self-important stories to follow. This movie is a case of franchise hubris, and there's nothing else to say really.
The actors are fine, the pacing is pretty ok. Jacob is the most fun character and the only one with an actual sense. Unfortunately, all of this is in service of a pretty bad idea.