Versus movies are all the rage right now, after the lost son of Krypton took on Gotham’s dark knight in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Iron Man went 10 bloody rounds with Steve Rogers’ patriotic superhero in Captain America: Civil War. So why not take it to the next level? I want to see the gloriously unpretentious team from JK Rowling’s marvelous new wizarding fantasy Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them lining up against Marvel and DC’s top colorfully costumed goliaths, if only because it might tell us something about Hollywood’s rapidly shifting definition of heroism in 2016.
In the red, white and blue corner, we might have Captain America, 6ft and 200lb of muscular superhero brawn in the shape of star Chris Evans. And perhaps Batfleck himself, a whopping 6ft4in and 228lb of brutally Herculean dark knight of Gotham.
Over on the other side of the ring? Yes, it’s Britain’s slender Eddie Redmayne (aka tweedy wizard Newt Scamander) – who one suspects has never visited a gym in his life – alongside Brooklyn-born actor Dan Fogler, who plays cuddly New York muggle (OK, No-Maj) Jacob Kowalski in Fantastic Beasts. The bell has only just been rung for round one, but what’s this? It looks like Rowling’s noobs are already on top.
For while there have been some excellent comic book movies in 2016 – Civil War, Doctor Strange and Deadpool all shifting the zeitgeist in their own way – this has also been a year of disappointment and diminishing returns, with Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad pummeled with critical brickbats and 20th Century Fox’s X-Men: Apocalypse also drawing lukewarm reviews. Marvel might make it look easy, but it turns out this whole superhero “cinematic universe” thing is anything but.
The comic book movie genre, so popular over the past decade, suddenly looks vulnerable. And not just because Warner Bros can’t get its house together when it comes to the studio’s all-new, painfully received DC Expanded Universe.
For JK Rowling’s impressively imagined, immaculately plotted tale of witchy goings-on in 1920s New York almost looks like the antidote to our current fascination with comic-book titans. At the very least, it paints a rather more attainable vision of heroism than we might have been used to seeing in blockbuster fare in recent times.
Out go musclebound alpha males, impossibly attractive Nietzschean supermen in tight-fitting clothing; in come heroes we can identify with, who look a lot more like us – and a lot less like the us we might imagine ourselves becoming if we spent all our time pounding weights and knocking back egg whites and chicken breast.
Batman might be a psychologically scarred weirdo who hunts bad guys in a vain attempt to excise the aching memories of his parents’ deaths, but he’s also a billionaire playboy who lives in an enormous mansion, stages ostentatious parties with the world’s press watching and (in the Zack Snyder era) makes Trump-like remarks to an incognito Wonder Woman. Kind of a jock then.
His counterpart in Fantastic Beasts, Redmayne’s Newt Scamander, is a geeky magical Dr Dolittle, all battered threads and humble, old-fashioned charm, as if he spends so much time looking after his beloved magical creatures that there’s not much left for taking care of his own appearance. His friend Jacob is – wait for it – a wannabe baker who makes it clear early on that the way to his heart is through his stomach. As templates for heroism, these are like little we’ve seen in blockbuster fare since The Hobbit trilogy a couple of years back, or even Rowling’s own Potter films before that.
We haven’t mentioned the ladies yet. While the superhero genre has so far offered us mostly female heroes who are either playing second fiddle to the boys or are (at worst) only onscreen for the purpose of objectification, Fantastic Beasts gives us sisters Porpentina and Queenie Goldstein, one a fretting but likeable wannabe auror, the other a flirtatious minx whose beauty is never as important to Rowling as the heart in her chest so big it’s fit to burst. Scamander may be the oddball star of the show, but his new friends have also been made from thrillingly unorthodox moulds.
If you think this whole Fantastic Beasts-v-superheroes argument is an artificially conceived tussle, consider this: Marvel has at least eight movies heading for theaters between now and 2020, with DC planning a similar level of output. Meanwhile, Warner Bros announced recently that there would eventually be five films in the Fantastic Beasts saga. Along with Star Wars, these are going to be the big movie sagas battling it out for space at the multiplex over the next decade or so. The vision of heroism they present matters.
Superheroes have always been unattainably perfect physical specimens, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But in this age of Trumpian alpha males, it’s good to see a gentler, less ostentatious form of valor making a return to the big screen. If Rowling’s new saga can repeat the feats of the Potter movies, once the highest-grossing film franchise of all time (before being overtaken by Marvel and Star Wars), the beloved author might just achieve more than simply saving Warner Bros from its own ineptitude.
In Fantastic Beasts, everyone is desperately looking for Scamander’s escaped creatures. But Rowling’s search for a kinder and more inclusive form of Hollywood heroism may ultimately be the more vital quest.
