FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD (2018) - The magic is dead
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is a historical fantasy film directed by David Yates, written by J. K. Rowling, and starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, William Nadylam, Zoë Kravitz, Callum Turner, Claudia Kim, Jude Law, and Johnny Depp. The film is the sequel to 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the second in the Fantastic Beasts series, and the tenth in the Wizarding World franchise. Taking place three months after the events of the previous film, The Crimes of Grindelwald follows Newt Scamander and Tina Goldstein as they search for Credence Barebone in Paris, who himself is searching for his identity and lost family. In the meantime, Gellert Grindelwald is amassing a strong following for his upcoming war against Muggles.
Hollywood has a prequel problem.
Walk with me: Remember in 1999 when The Phantom Menace was released and immediately was met with uproarious applause before everyone sat down and released how bad that movie was? Remember how the following two films in the Star Wars prequel trilogy was met with about the same reception? Remember in 2003 when The Return of the King was met with widespread critical and commercial success and we were all "omgggg The Lord of the Rings trilogy was so good!! Peter Jackson can do no wrong!!", and then he went on to make The Hobbit trilogy and we saw all the wrong he could do? Yeah... enter: J. K. Rowling, the newest member of the Terrible Prequels club.
In my experience, many of the more successful prequels in film display the same common traits: they introduce a fresh take on the series without being worried about connecting to the main series. Good prequels are more involved with telling their own story rather than reintroducing or explaining elements from the original series and any cameos present are very limited. You see this with Casino Royale, X-Men First Class, and the new Planet of the Apes trilogy.
Likewise, many of the less successful prequels typically involve a director who's trying too hard to be like the original series--often times it's the same director who was involved in the series as well. These prequels are obsessed with their originals, insistent on saturating each scene with some reference or tie-in to the original movies and explaining things that often don't need to be explained. You see this with the Star Wars prequels, The Hobbit trilogy, Prometheus, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and now the Fantastic Beasts movies.
But why has Fantastic Beasts been such a disappointment? What has made Joanne Rowling fallen so? Where has all the magic gone? Well dear reader, let's taco bout it.
The Spoiler-Free Review
Alright, let's get this out of the way first because I have very little to say without getting into spoilers. This is a terrible movie. I am probably a bit biased because of how much of a Potterhead I am, but I've been thinking about this all day since I've watched the movie and I genuinely do not think there is anything here that is really worth watching. Bad movies always have some good things about them, but I truly think that this movie is objectively bad and there is very, very little to redeem it.
The story is practically nonexistent and nothing of substance really happens throughout the entire 134 minutes. That's not to say there isn't a lot of information given--quite the opposite actually. There is SO MUCH exposition dumping in this movie and so many side plots happening at once, but it's like Rowling is too interested in vomiting 400 pieces of information that she couldn't properly form a story out of them. A lot is told, but nothing really happens. There are a lot of side plots, but none of them get properly developed. And really, it feels like the entire movie was made just to set up a twist reveal at the end that is so absurdly dumb and poorly written that I almost gave up on the series.
An egregious side effect of Rowling's inability to form a coherent story is that she isn't able to create actual characters. You might have noticed above that I listed quite a lot of stars or that the movie poster is obnoxiously crowded with so many characters--more than half of whom are introduced in this movie. They are all worthless. All the new characters are introduced and given zero development throughout the entire runtime, and all the old characters are either less interesting, more boring versions of themselves from the previous movie or are completely different in characterization that they are essentially a different character altogether. The only character that I actually liked in this movie was Newt Scamander, not so much that he was a good character but because he was the only one who did not annoy me to death with their portrayal.
And at the very least, there could have been good action scenes so it could just be viewed as a dumb action flick but even that is severely lacking. Rowling seems to have completely forgotten that spells are meant to be spoken in this fantasy world because almost everyone now just points their wand and multi-colored lights would automatically flash and do magic. No more silly wand waving or fake Latin, just l i g h t s. How magical.
Remember when spells actually did stuff? Remember that really epic duel at the end of Order of the Phoenix where Dumbledore and Voldemort's spells actually did things and it looked really cool? Well, Rowling apparently hasn't because every spell is either a gun spell or Avada Kedavra. Yup, about 80% of the spells performed in this movie are just people pointing wands and firing generic explosion spells like guns. All the while not saying the names of the spells because it's not like this is a fantasy series about magic or anything. And even worse, pretty much every single action scene is incomprehensible and feels very shoehorned-in because Rowling knew that her audience was bored to tears at the nonexistent story.
Remember when spells actually did stuff? Remember that really epic duel at the end of Order of the Phoenix where Dumbledore and Voldemort's spells actually did things and it looked really cool? Well, Rowling apparently hasn't because every spell is either a gun spell or Avada Kedavra. Yup, about 80% of the spells performed in this movie are just people pointing wands and firing generic explosion spells like guns. All the while not saying the names of the spells because it's not like this is a fantasy series about magic or anything. And even worse, pretty much every single action scene is incomprehensible and feels very shoehorned-in because Rowling knew that her audience was bored to tears at the nonexistent story.
And really who is this movie for? If I had to guess, I'd say it was made to pander to the loyal Potter fans who worship Rowling and take whatever she writes as Gospel Truth. Because it's not really a movie for casual Harry Potter fans--a lot of important plot points require you to have a good knowledge of the series' lore to fully appreciate. And it's not really a movie for the hardcore Harry Potter fans either because a lot of the twists, reveals, and cameos don't make sense with the established history and lore.
If you haven't watched it yet, spare yourself the money and buy yourself something nice for Black Friday. If you really desperately want to know what happens, just wait and watch it for free in a few months. This disappointment isn't worth your money.
If you haven't watched it yet, spare yourself the money and buy yourself something nice for Black Friday. If you really desperately want to know what happens, just wait and watch it for free in a few months. This disappointment isn't worth your money.
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| Easily the best part of the movie is Jude Law's portrayal of Dumbledore. |
The Spoiler-Filled Review/Rant
I am astonished that J. K. Rowling wrote this because there are amateur levels of writing present in this movie, and she doesn't seem to remember any of the things that made the Harry Potter series work so well.
The Harry Potter books started off with a strong core team of three: Harry, Ron, and Hermione. This cast slowly grew as the books went along, eventually adding in Neville, then Luna, then Ginny, etc., while many other characters were kept strictly in the background. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them gives us a great story, introducing four unique but interesting characters, each of whom are more creative characters than the admittedly stock set of "hero, best friend, girl" that Rowling used for Harry Potter.
It seems really strange, then, that she decided to make Tina and Jacob practically useless in Crimes of Grindelwald while Queenie completely changes her personality to force in some big "good guy turns evil" moment. It's like Rowling was so convinced that her thirty-seven new characters were soooo interesting that she wanted to cut most of the original cast, but still kept them in anyway to "appease her fans". Newt's just kind of there now, and while I liked him a lot in the last movie he just seemed a really ill fit for the protagonist of this movie. Tina and Jacob serve no role in the story and they both could have been edited out of the movie rather easily. And Queenie might as well be a completely different character if she's going to do something as stupid as joining the genocidal maniac murderer who had tried to kill her own sister three months ago.
And let's talk about those thirty-seven new characters. Leta Lestrange appears--rather really quickly I thought--in this movie and she contributes to absolutely nothing. She has no character other than "having a dark side" and I think we're supposed to see her as some tortured soul, but her character is so flat and uninteresting that nobody cared when she died. She was also a key part in the Lestrange tomb scene--the objectively worst scene in the movie where she and her half-brother just go all "let me tell you the story of my people" on the audience and give a 5+ minute long exposition dump where they just TELL their backstory to the audience. That's it. It's just them TALKING about their tragic pasts. And even worse, NOTHING is really revealed at the end because their stories just work to contradict each other's. We don't get any reveal about anything, so that entire scene could have easily been removed along with those characters!
Her hubby Theseus Scamander--Newt's brother--is equally as uninteresting. He was mentioned briefly as a war hero in the last movie and I was really interested in seeing a Scamander brother who probably was Newt's opposite--charming, masculine, and charismatic--but instead we get this really boring character who, again, doesn't do anything the entire movie. And also I could never unsee him as Percy Weasley.
Yusuf Kama, Claudius Yates, and Bunty are all really boring characters that you probably forgot they were in the movie until I said so. Some of you might not even have caught that I completely made one of those names up. And that's not even mentioning Grindelwald's lackies who win the award for Most Forgettable Evil Henchmen. It's a really weird world we live in where real actors have far less stage presence than the PS3 graphics CGI Children of Thanos.
Credence also returns in this movie and does nothing other than moan and whine like a less impressive version of Kylo Ren. That's it. Oh, and I'm not going to talk about the twist reveal at the ending, because there's nothing to say other than that it's really, really, really stupid and I have read (and written) fanfiction that has better writing than that.
Am I forgetting someone? Oh yeah, Nagini... ah, Nagini. Well I for one didn't really view her as a racist character... because she wasn't even a character. Not really. She's such a non-character that you could LITERALLY edit her out of every scene she was in and NOTHING would change. Just remove the circus scene that introduces and that's it. Every. Single. Scene. Plays. Out. Exactly. As. It. Did. That's how much of a non-character she is. I swear it's like J. K. Rowling was responding to all her critics who said Harry Potter was too white, so she made up the whole "Nagini is an Asian woman" thing at the last minute and hastily edited it into the story because that's the extent of her character.
And you really have to give Rowling credit for her very, very diverse cast of mostly white people and three minorities, one of whom is just "the girlfriend" of a white man, one of whom is a child of a black woman literally enslaved by a white man, all three of whom are so, so boring. Ah, such diverse. Much representation.
Speaking of representation, let's talk about Dumbledore x Grindelwald. Dumblewald? Grindeldore? I just wanted to say that, you know there has been a lot of controversy in the Harry Potter community about how little LGBT representation there was in the series, which is why when Rowling revealed that Dumbledore was gay and had always been gay and we were just too stupid to see it, we all responded with joyous praise and celebration. And I think there is one really good thing about this movie that you can't really deny. In Crimes of Grindelwald, we actually get to see a little bit of the homosexual relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald where as teens they performed this blood pact together by cutting their palms and holding their hands together. And I think this is really important, especially in 2018, that people watch this and know that yes, that is how gay people have sex.
Yeah, no, that was a lie. The relationship was practically nonexistent. I mean, it's subtext. But it's like, just subtext. Freaking LeFou from that mediocre Beauty and the Beast remake was gayer than Dumblewald, and that was already really bad.
Jude Law as Dumbledore is easily the only good (read: least awful) thing about this movie. He's not a super accurate depiction of book Dumbledore (I'm afraid we'll never get a truly book-accurate Dumbledore) but he does portray the kind, caring, yet manipulative part of ole' Brian, so that's good. I'm not going to talk about Johnny Depp other than I think it was a really stupid decision that this was the hill Rowling chose to die on.
I cannot really comment on the story of this movie because there wasn't one. If you're not convinced how terribly nonexistent the story is, just ask yourself what actually happened in the book? The entire movie, Newt and Tina are just searching for Credence and Credence is just searching for his family. That's basically it. The big finale showdown isn't a duel between wizards, it isn't a high-stakes time travel plot, it isn't a tragic death of a beloved character, it isn't a highly character-driven revelation. It's a Nazi rally. That's it. The entire movie led up to a nationalist Nazi rally. How... exciting?
Also, can we talk about the title really quick? First of all, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is easily the worst and most boring title in the entire series. It means nothing. It sounds so boring. And it's not even an accurate depiction of the movie which had a total of three (3) fantastic beasts and zero (0) crimes committed by Grindelwald. Like Oh Boy Gee Willickers I can't wait until the next movie Fantastic Beasts: Return of the Dumbledore in 2020, then Fantastic Beasts: War for the Planet of the Wizards in 2022, then Fantastic Beasts: Dumbledore v. Grindelwald: Dawn of Voldemort in 2024.
A fellow Potterhead believes, and the cynic in me agrees, that Rowling has got to be fucking with us. Her book series had gotten so popular and she had received so much praise in the past two decades that in the public consciousness, she could do no wrong and she knows it. So given that, I almost wouldn't put it past her for intentionally making a really terrible movie just to see if her fans would call her out for her shit. "How far could I go before they finally call me out?" she might have wondered.
Of course, I don't really believe this, mostly because fans have been calling her out for her shit for years now for her tweets and insistence that she is very, very #woke you guys. From her "reveal" that Dumbledore is totes gay to her insistence that Hermione very well could have been a black girl to her "worldbuilding" that tends to be stereotypical at best and plain racist at worst, it seems clear that Rowling is a skilled writer when it comes to depicting the life she's always known (aka white Europeans), and woefully uninformed to write anything that's not that. Despite all that, Rowling is still so insistent that she is a literary genius and NOT problematic that she still continues to push back against her fans, namely with her defense over the decision to make Nagini into an Asian woman which she swears she had planned from the very beginning.
And now with the release of the worst received Wizarding World movie ever, I wonder if she will take criticisms of her screenwriting abilities to heart. I wonder if she will finally realize that she is an author of books and that is a very, very different thing from a writer of movies. I hope that she will learn this and humbly step down to just write the story and let someone else write the screenplay. I hope, for all of our sakes, that Rowling will admit that even she, goddess of literature, needs help.
Easily the worst of the entire Wizarding World franchise, this was the first time I really felt that the magic had died. I rewatched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone just last night with my nieces and nephews and I still get the same sense of magical wonder and awe that I got when I first watched that movie when I was their age. Harry Potter was a regular boy thrust into a magical world that he was always enamored by, and as a result so we were. But the series isn't interesting in any of that anymore. The wonderful wizarding world is no longer wonderful, full of color and magic and delight. It's black-and-white, it's somber, it's sad.
Sorry this review was super long and possibly boring, but I figure that anyone who's seen this movie would be used to long and boring things by now.
The Harry Potter books started off with a strong core team of three: Harry, Ron, and Hermione. This cast slowly grew as the books went along, eventually adding in Neville, then Luna, then Ginny, etc., while many other characters were kept strictly in the background. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them gives us a great story, introducing four unique but interesting characters, each of whom are more creative characters than the admittedly stock set of "hero, best friend, girl" that Rowling used for Harry Potter.
It seems really strange, then, that she decided to make Tina and Jacob practically useless in Crimes of Grindelwald while Queenie completely changes her personality to force in some big "good guy turns evil" moment. It's like Rowling was so convinced that her thirty-seven new characters were soooo interesting that she wanted to cut most of the original cast, but still kept them in anyway to "appease her fans". Newt's just kind of there now, and while I liked him a lot in the last movie he just seemed a really ill fit for the protagonist of this movie. Tina and Jacob serve no role in the story and they both could have been edited out of the movie rather easily. And Queenie might as well be a completely different character if she's going to do something as stupid as joining the genocidal maniac murderer who had tried to kill her own sister three months ago.
Her hubby Theseus Scamander--Newt's brother--is equally as uninteresting. He was mentioned briefly as a war hero in the last movie and I was really interested in seeing a Scamander brother who probably was Newt's opposite--charming, masculine, and charismatic--but instead we get this really boring character who, again, doesn't do anything the entire movie. And also I could never unsee him as Percy Weasley.
Yusuf Kama, Claudius Yates, and Bunty are all really boring characters that you probably forgot they were in the movie until I said so. Some of you might not even have caught that I completely made one of those names up. And that's not even mentioning Grindelwald's lackies who win the award for Most Forgettable Evil Henchmen. It's a really weird world we live in where real actors have far less stage presence than the PS3 graphics CGI Children of Thanos.
Credence also returns in this movie and does nothing other than moan and whine like a less impressive version of Kylo Ren. That's it. Oh, and I'm not going to talk about the twist reveal at the ending, because there's nothing to say other than that it's really, really, really stupid and I have read (and written) fanfiction that has better writing than that.
And you really have to give Rowling credit for her very, very diverse cast of mostly white people and three minorities, one of whom is just "the girlfriend" of a white man, one of whom is a child of a black woman literally enslaved by a white man, all three of whom are so, so boring. Ah, such diverse. Much representation.
Speaking of representation, let's talk about Dumbledore x Grindelwald. Dumblewald? Grindeldore? I just wanted to say that, you know there has been a lot of controversy in the Harry Potter community about how little LGBT representation there was in the series, which is why when Rowling revealed that Dumbledore was gay and had always been gay and we were just too stupid to see it, we all responded with joyous praise and celebration. And I think there is one really good thing about this movie that you can't really deny. In Crimes of Grindelwald, we actually get to see a little bit of the homosexual relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald where as teens they performed this blood pact together by cutting their palms and holding their hands together. And I think this is really important, especially in 2018, that people watch this and know that yes, that is how gay people have sex.
 |
| Ah yes. Who wouldn't want a piece of that sexy, sexy rat-man Johnny Depp? |
Yeah, no, that was a lie. The relationship was practically nonexistent. I mean, it's subtext. But it's like, just subtext. Freaking LeFou from that mediocre Beauty and the Beast remake was gayer than Dumblewald, and that was already really bad.
Jude Law as Dumbledore is easily the only good (read: least awful) thing about this movie. He's not a super accurate depiction of book Dumbledore (I'm afraid we'll never get a truly book-accurate Dumbledore) but he does portray the kind, caring, yet manipulative part of ole' Brian, so that's good. I'm not going to talk about Johnny Depp other than I think it was a really stupid decision that this was the hill Rowling chose to die on.
I cannot really comment on the story of this movie because there wasn't one. If you're not convinced how terribly nonexistent the story is, just ask yourself what actually happened in the book? The entire movie, Newt and Tina are just searching for Credence and Credence is just searching for his family. That's basically it. The big finale showdown isn't a duel between wizards, it isn't a high-stakes time travel plot, it isn't a tragic death of a beloved character, it isn't a highly character-driven revelation. It's a Nazi rally. That's it. The entire movie led up to a nationalist Nazi rally. How... exciting?
Also, can we talk about the title really quick? First of all, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is easily the worst and most boring title in the entire series. It means nothing. It sounds so boring. And it's not even an accurate depiction of the movie which had a total of three (3) fantastic beasts and zero (0) crimes committed by Grindelwald. Like Oh Boy Gee Willickers I can't wait until the next movie Fantastic Beasts: Return of the Dumbledore in 2020, then Fantastic Beasts: War for the Planet of the Wizards in 2022, then Fantastic Beasts: Dumbledore v. Grindelwald: Dawn of Voldemort in 2024.
J. K. Rowling has got to be trolling
But now, the question still remains: why was The Crimes of Grindelwald--and the Fantastic Beasts series as a whole--so poorly received? Both of these were written directly by J. K. Rowling herself, so why?A fellow Potterhead believes, and the cynic in me agrees, that Rowling has got to be fucking with us. Her book series had gotten so popular and she had received so much praise in the past two decades that in the public consciousness, she could do no wrong and she knows it. So given that, I almost wouldn't put it past her for intentionally making a really terrible movie just to see if her fans would call her out for her shit. "How far could I go before they finally call me out?" she might have wondered.
Of course, I don't really believe this, mostly because fans have been calling her out for her shit for years now for her tweets and insistence that she is very, very #woke you guys. From her "reveal" that Dumbledore is totes gay to her insistence that Hermione very well could have been a black girl to her "worldbuilding" that tends to be stereotypical at best and plain racist at worst, it seems clear that Rowling is a skilled writer when it comes to depicting the life she's always known (aka white Europeans), and woefully uninformed to write anything that's not that. Despite all that, Rowling is still so insistent that she is a literary genius and NOT problematic that she still continues to push back against her fans, namely with her defense over the decision to make Nagini into an Asian woman which she swears she had planned from the very beginning.
And now with the release of the worst received Wizarding World movie ever, I wonder if she will take criticisms of her screenwriting abilities to heart. I wonder if she will finally realize that she is an author of books and that is a very, very different thing from a writer of movies. I hope that she will learn this and humbly step down to just write the story and let someone else write the screenplay. I hope, for all of our sakes, that Rowling will admit that even she, goddess of literature, needs help.
Final Verdict
At some point during the movie, Newt Scamander said, "You might not want to watch this," and I thought to myself that that would have been the most accurate tagline for the entire movie.Easily the worst of the entire Wizarding World franchise, this was the first time I really felt that the magic had died. I rewatched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone just last night with my nieces and nephews and I still get the same sense of magical wonder and awe that I got when I first watched that movie when I was their age. Harry Potter was a regular boy thrust into a magical world that he was always enamored by, and as a result so we were. But the series isn't interesting in any of that anymore. The wonderful wizarding world is no longer wonderful, full of color and magic and delight. It's black-and-white, it's somber, it's sad.
Sorry this review was super long and possibly boring, but I figure that anyone who's seen this movie would be used to long and boring things by now.
Score: D-
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