Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

I'm sure I've probably mentioned this before, but I never had a huge emotional attachment to Harry Potter. I enjoyed the books I read and I enjoyed the movies but it's not at the top of my list of favorite franchises.

When Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them came out, I found myself surprisingly entranced by the expansion of a really cool world. Say what you will about J.K.Rowling (which in my opinion shouldn't really be anything bad for whatever reason, she's living her best life, leave her alone!) but she did create a really interesting world and she now has the opportunity to expand on it in movies. We should be happy that there's this opportunity to continue to get stories from the Wizarding World.

However, after some time of reflection, besides the world building, I honestly don't remember a whole lot about the plot of the first Fantastic Beasts movie and I haven't had an inkling to go back to that movie. I was excited for the Crimes of Grindelwald until I heard from some people that the movie wasn't that good, and since I don't have that big of a connection to the Wizarding World franchise, I was okay skipping this one in theaters... Boy was that the right choice.

The Crimes of Grindelwald takes place 6 or so months after the first film and Grindelwald (played unfortunately by Johnny Depp) escapes his custody, kind of making the the end of the first movie kind of pointless, but whatever.

The Ministry of Magic is trying to find him and stop him from exposing the wizarding world and perpetuating a war between the Magic World and the Non-Magic World.

Albus Dumbledore (played by Jude Law), tries to recruit Newt Scamander (played by Eddie Redmayne) to find to do... something? Find Credence (played again by Ezra Miller) or go after Grindelwald, or something. To be honest, I'm not totally clear on Dumbledore's whole role in this movie but I'll explain why later. Aside from a really unclear motivation for Dumbledore that hopefully will be reconciled in the next film, this was actually the more interesting part of the movie. Aurors trying to find Grindelwald and weighing the question of whether or not Magic users should just live in the shadows to Muggles is actually an interesting dilemma...

Too bad they already established Newt Scamander as the main character...

Newt says no to Dumbledore's vague mission to go to Paris but ends up going exactly where Dumbledore wants him to go when his American friends Queenie and Jacob (played by Alison Sudol and Dan Fogler) come to visit him. Queenie goes off on her own to find Tina (played again by Katherine Waterson) who is looking for Credence in Paris so even though Newt wasn't going to leave the country, he does... for a girl?

And I don't even want to go into the bullshit relationship stuff that they bring up in this movie because it's forced. It's contrived. And it takes away from what could have been an epic as fuck movie.

Meanwhile, Credence from the first movie is back and he's hanging out in a circus trying to figure out who he is. He just kind of meanders around the whole movie with the same stupid expression on his face and people thought it was relevant the entire movie because A: The movie said it was, and B: he was hanging out with a character named Nagini (played by Claudia Kim) that if you're a fan of the books, you know is the snake that hangs out with Voldemort in the regular movies.

Overall, the movie is Newt and his friends, and the good guys looking for Credence while Grindelwald is doing the same thing and there's an underlying tension being built up for a finale. If it was a good movie I'd be excited, but this is such a stumble that I'm not sure how I feel by the end of the film.

 Credence could be an interesting character. Again, him "dying" in the first movie was made really insignificant but by the end of this movie there is an inkling that they could be doing something cool here.

Nagini on the other hand had no purpose in this movie whatsoever. The sole reason she is in this movie is for fan girls to gasp that they recognize a name from the books or movies.

This is one of the biggest problems with this movie. There are a lot of issues with this movie, but this movie goes out of its way to tie itself to the original Harry Potter movies and I'm not totally sure why. It's pretty obvious that the two worlds are connected, people are not confused. There was no reason for Nicholas Flammel to be in this movie and he literally shows up out of no where. He adds nothing to the movie.

But I think the worst is when the movie stops dead in its tracks to tell the story of a character who only is significant because she has the LeStrange last name. Zoe Kravitz plays Leta LeStrange and there is a scene where they spend a good chunk of the movie delving into her backstory and her family tree for no good reason.

A rivalries among wizard brothers vying for the affection of a girl with a troubled history could have been the entire movie. If JK really thought it was important to throw in this detour on the LeStrange family, why didn't she just make the movie about that? It's interesting stuff, don't get me wrong, but remember we have the actual Crimes of Grindelwald to focus on, we don't have time to detour into the backstory of Zoe Kravitz's character who, minor spoilers, won't have an impact on future films in this franchise.

And that's another problem with this movie. It's all over the place. There's so many characters and they all have kind of interesting stories. I already mentioned the rivalry between Newt and his brother Theseus (played by Callum Turner) but honestly, that subplot is right in the middle between most boring and most interesting plot lines. On the boring end you've got Queenie and Jacob working their way through a world that doesn't accept their love. You also have the paper thin romance between Tina and Newt. You have Newt's creatures that while interesting, don't add a whole lot to a movie called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

But the major story line that everyone is missing out on in this movie is Albus Freaking Dumbledore.

You have beloved actor Jude Law playing a beloved character, Albus Dumbledore and he's barely in the film! What a waste! Sure they bring up some interesting things like him as a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, his relationship with Grindelwald, his position as one of the most powerful wizards  alive and yet being on the outs with the mainstream wizarding government. There's so many ways they could have gone with this, and they don't do anything with it!

I get it, we've created the character of Newt Scamander, he needs to be the center, we're down that road already. And to give some more credit to this film, it does give Newt a little more development. We learn about his family, more about how he was as a kid and what drives him as a character not totally taking sides until he absolutely needs to. That's great... BUT.

In comparison with Albus Dumbledore, he's super boring. Compared to Dumbledore, a character who already has so much context, everyone else in this movie seems super dull. On top of that, Newt doesn't feel like he should be in this movie.

The reality is, the first movie wrapped up in an okay manner. Any plot lines were tied up pretty easily and in order to bring everyone together again in the sequel, the script needs to explain why they're returning from that wrapped up ending from the first film. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the way Newt, and Tina, and Queenie, and Jacob all come together feels really forced and awkward.

This story seems like it's more about Dumbledore, and Leta LeStrange... sorta, and Credence, and Grindelwald, and Newt is literally in the background because if you apply logic, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why he's there in the first place. Again, I get it, people like Newt, he's a unique character because he's not the chosen one or the strongest, but that needs to be incorporated into the story organically or it feels awkward.

Now there are a lot of issues I have with this film but the bottom line truth is, there were elements of it that I did like. Despite this movie having too many characters, I still do like Newt, Tina, Queenie and Jacob. They're not utilized or written smoothly in this film but the care that I had for them in the first movie kind of did carry forward.

While the flashbacks in this movie are long, I did like them a lot. And I'll say this with a huge caveat, but I liked Johnny Depp's Grindelwald.

If this movie was better I would for sure do a spoilers review because there is a lot that doesn't work about this character that would spoil the movie. However, there were aspects of the character of Grindelwald that I thought were interesting. He's not the worst villain in the world and I'd be lying if I said he wasn't one of the more interesting parts of the movie.

However, there are two caveats with that. The first is that his character is poorly written and a lot of things just happen because the plot requires or because there are inconsistencies. But the other caveat is that I really wish it wasn't Johnny Depp playing this role. I still think back to the first film and I remember Colin Farrell and I still think I would have liked him just as much if not more. It's unfortunate that someone's personal bad choices can sully a performance, especially one that's really not that bad in comparison with Depp's recent roles. But I just think Warner Brothers made a mistake to double down on this character when they could have easily thrown some white dye in Colin Farrell's hair and gone with that choice instead.

And at the end of the day, despite all this movie's issues, I am actually kind of excited for the sequel and how this movie hopefully wraps up.

The take away from both Fantastic Beast movies is that people are interested in an extended Harry Potter Universe, it just has to be done well. The reality is that both movies have been building up to the fight between Dumbledore and Grindelwald which was mentioned in The Deathly Hallows and was supposed to be super epic. The problem is that it is taking 3 movies for us to get there, and the focus isn't on the characters it needs to be on. They're expanding what amounts to a chapter in a book into three movies. I'd say that's as bad as pushing out a book like The Hobbit into three movies but at least that was a book, not a chapter and a fictional encyclopedia.

I've noticed a lot of videos and commentary on this movie is pretty critical of J.K. Rowling and some of her world building choices in the past decade. I didn't really want to incorporate that into this review because the truth is, as funny as it is, she can do whatever the hell she wants. If she wants to put out a trivia question that Wizards used to just shit where they stood and make their shit disappear, she can do that. It's weird, but it's not something I'm going to get worked up over.

My only hope would be that J.K. is making big changes to her world and characters to make herself happy, not her fans. I get the feeling when she wrote the Harry Potter books that she just wanted to write a story about Wizards and Witches. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them seems like she's trying to write a story that she thinks the fans are going to want but they just seem to be stumbling. J.K. seems to do her best work when she's writing for herself, not to please fans, and especially not to please her Social Justice minded fans. Every retcon saying that Dumbledore and Grindelwald had a hardcore sexual relationship without putting that explicitly in the movie seems half hearted and crowd pleasing.

But whatever, live your life JK. You do you.

But those are my thoughts on Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. What did you think? Are you excited for the sequel? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

Thanks for reading!