Fantastic Beasts Details That Only Adults Notice

The film opens with Newt Scamander arriving in New York on a steam ship and going through customs, which is a great way to introduce the audience to our new main character and kick off a little bit of tension with his enchanted briefcase. The thing is, Newt's a wizard. It's kind of his whole deal, and in what we've seen from the wizarding world already, wizards don't usually enjoy hanging around with Muggles for three weeks while their ships chug across the Atlantic Ocean.

We're not saying Newt should've ridden a broom to a different hemisphere, and there's a mention in the books the Floo Powder network requires some kind of connections that probably don't stretch across oceans. It even makes sense that he wouldn't Apparate, since that's a pretty far distance that could be pretty difficult — even for someone who teleports around like Nightcrawler from the X-Men during every fight scene.

That still leaves plenty of options, though. We've known about portkeys since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but even if that's impractical, the magic-users in J.K. Rowling's world  tend to stick to their own modes of transportation. The Knight Bus, the train to Hogwarts, and even the Weasley family's flying Ford are strictly for wizards. Newt's trip to America, while shady, doesn't seem to be especially clandestine, so why bother with the most inconvenient way to travel?

Almost an hour into the movie, Newt and Jacob have a very short and very revealing conversation about their pasts when Newt asks Jacob if he "fought in the war." "Of course I fought in the war," Jacob says. "Everybody fought in the war." That makes sense, too — Fantastic Beasts takes place in 1926, less than a decade after the end of World War I, a conflict that left an indelible mark on an entire generation. The fact that Jacob served in the war isn't a surprise, but his remark about "everyone" is proven in the very next line, when Newt confirms that he was there, too, working with dragons on the Eastern Front.

Even by the standards of the 20th century's first dive into mechanized warfare, the Eastern Front in World War I was pretty grim, to say the least. The idea that Newt was there, dealing with the nearly unimaginable horrors of that war, puts his difficulty in dealing with people in a whole new light, recasting it as the kind of trauma that was then referred to as shellshock. There's more to it, though, informing the core of Newt's character.

The fact that he was working with dragons means that someone wanted to use dragons for warfare — and the original screenplay for Fantastic Beasts includes a tidbit about that experiment, explaining that it was abandoned because the dragons would only listen to Newt and ate everyone else involved. That's horrifying in its own right, but seeing firsthand that other wizards could use those fantastic beasts for widespread destruction explains a lot about Newt's devotion to protecting them.

Not all of the eyebrow-raising moments in Fantastic Beasts have to do with complicated histories or deep dives into canon. Some of them come as a result of some pretty low-brow humor, like the joke about Jacob being a little too hefty to fit into Newt's magically spacious suitcase/menagerie. 

The first time he tries to enter, Jacob gets stuck in the suitcase's opening, surely giving plenty of kids a few laughs before he eventually drops into the massive space beneath. Here's the thing, though: only a few moments later, when Newt is trying to capture the elephant-sized Erumpent that's gotten loose in the Central Park Zoo, Newt's able to cram it right back in the opening without much trouble. It takes a few minutes, sure, but it goes right back in under the lid with only a few seconds of work — about the same amount of time that it takes Jacob to dislodge himself, in fact.

If you're paying attention, and trying to find the kind of logical consistency that a franchise that's literally built on learning the rules of magic demands, then this raises the question: if it can choke down what is basically a thrashing box truck, then why did the suitcase have such a hard time with Jacob, a pretty normal-sized dude? Was it Newt being a jerk to him? Was it the suitcase itself being a jerk? If so, that's a pretty rude piece of luggage.

While it's always fun to see flashy spells and towering magical creatures, one of the most enjoyable parts of the Harry Potter universe for adults comes from seeing how wizards deal with everyday life. In  Fantastic Beasts, we get an interesting look at office life when we're taken into the inside-out skyscraper that serves as the headquarters for the Magical Congress of the United States of America, the US equivalent to Great Britain's Ministry of Magic.

No sooner do we get a glimpse at MACUSA's offices, though, than we also find out that it's not exactly the most efficient workplace. In fact, their approach to paperwork is bound to make anyone with an office job grind their teeth in frustration. The reason? Rather than taking the form of elegant paper airplanes like the ones that zip around the Ministry, MACUSA's interoffice memos instead origami themselves into rats and run from one desk to the next.

Unless you have a severe case of musophobia, that's not actually that bad, and is really kind of cute... until the bit where two memos get into a fight and literally tear each other to pieces. That's troubling on its own, but when you realize that important memos are destroying each other, it suddenly makes a lot of sense that Newt's application for a wand permit was never answered after he sent it in. Get your paperwork together, MACUSA, we're trying to run a country over here.

Jacob Kowalski holds the interesting distinction of being the first muggle (or "no-maj," to use the American slang term in Fantastic Beasts) to be given a starring role in a franchise that's otherwise chock full of wizards and witches. His presence does more than just give any possible newbies a character to identify with as he learns about the Wizarding World, though. He also makes a pretty good case for the idea that brute force can pretty easily solve a lot of that world's challenges.

It's especially clear when he and Queenie are attempting to break into Graves' office at MACUSA. Queenie attempts to open the door with Alohomora, the unlocking spell that's been in use since the very first Potter book, and when it doesn't work, she mentions that Graves must have used "some fancy spell" to lock it. Considering that "Alohomora" worked when cast by a ten-year-old at a door that was meant to be guarding the Sorcerer's Stone from Voldemort, it would have to be pretty fancy indeed. And yet, Jacob, who by all indications has pretty average strength, is able to kick the door open with a single shot. Also, later in the film, he punches out a goblin gangster while everyone else is fumbling with their wands.

There's not a whole lot of physical violence in the Harry Potter franchise, which makes sense since it takes place in a culture where people can do virtually anything just by pointing a stick at something. Jacob proves, however, that brute force can bypass magic pretty easily if you know how to apply it, which might explain why all these people who can literally kill someone by speaking two words are so worried about going to war with non-wizards. It does make us wonder, though: could Harry have solved everything back in the first book if he'd just punted Professor Quirrel right in the ol' sorcerer's stones?

Another consequence of the Swooping Evil's venom neatly tying up the plot is that even the front pages of newspapers are changed to reflect everyone's new memories, which involve a little more rain and a lot less unchecked magical destruction being wreaked on their city. Here's the problem, though: people take pictures of all the magical stuff happening in the city — a lot of pictures. There's even a line of dialogue, when Henry Shaw Sr. tells his reporters to "take a lot of pictures" as flashbulbs go off.

It's possible to argue that Newt's memory potion is strong enough to change everything — although that makes this particular deus ex magica a little too neat, even by Potter standards — but there's one snag. We already know from the previous books and movies that Muggle cameras work just fine when it comes to capturing magic on film. Colin Creevey, a muggle-born classmate of Harry's, uses his camera to take plenty of photos at Hogwarts and mentions that the photographs only become magical when they're developed, not when they're taken.

Even if everyone's memories are erased to the point of rewriting newspapers, that's a whole lot of photos of magical domes and vengeful, shapeless spirits that are never addressed at all at the end of the film, which is something those of us old enough to understand how photographic evidence works just might take note of.