ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?
The latest serving of magical fiction from the Potter world of wizardry and adventure is now playing in the cinema. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the second installment from the Fantastic Beasts collection. Much anticipated, the second foray of creator J.K Rowling into script writing is gettin mixed reviews. Set in the time before Harry Potter, the story focuses on the lives of his professors and their war against the dark arts, mainly around the adventures of one wizard, Newt Scamander.
The latest installment has faced some criticism (I mean seriously, what doesn’t face criticism these days?) for a number of reasons. Some have taken issue with the actual movie itself, the plot and the general story (subjective points of view which is fair enough) but there has also been uproar of a more ludicrous kind. People are apparently sick of anything Harry Potter or magical related and have even gone to the extent of claiming that the films solely exist to generate money for those involved. Maybe... but who cares?
With a Harry Porter website that sorts you in a house and tells you what your patronus is, with a Pokémon Go type app going to be released seeped with creatures from the magical world, The Cursed Child play, the studio tours of Harry Potter World in Warner Brothers studios and Harry Potter Disneyland and the countless other trivia, games and costumes bombarding the main stream and pop culture shouldn’t the franchise just end now? Are we all pottered out?
For those of us who are massive Potterheads (please refer to my bio at the bottom of this column) any new story, based in the past, future or somewhere in between the timeline of Harry Potter, is both, never too much and never enough. I, like many of my fellow Hogwarts alumni, devour the stories whether they are on the big screen, on the stage or in the pages of a book.
Though it would be tempting for me to shame those calling for an end to all things potter, bitter muggles, I shall refrain. Although I might not directly understand how they cannot be remotely interested in the worlds J.K Rowling has created, I can sympathise. I don’t understand Star Wars. I don’t get it. I don’t see why it’s a big deal and the idea of watching the early films sounds like absolute torture to me. Though I’m not a fanatic, I do love comics and the franchises from both Marvel and DC, the bad, the brilliant, the ugly and the ones that will forever be rebooted and reimagined.
That’s the wonderful thing about good stories. Once they have their grip on you, are firmly nestled in your imagination, there is no stopping them. And yes, an argument exits that they can be taken too far, that the world we are invested in has been pumped up with steroids and stretched out beyond belief but, and this maybe unfortunate for some, there will always be an audience for them.