Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald 2018
I wasn’t crazy about the first Fantastic Beasts so when they said there would be five of them and the second got terrible ratings, I skipped it and resigned myself to miss this series. Then in 2022, the third got better reviews, and I had a free copy of this movie, so I watched it anyway. It is certainly a flawed movie, though still entertaining. Because it has been five years since I saw the first one, I don’t remember many details, though it seems like everyone is back, plus a bunch of new ones. The bad guys, led by Johnny Depp as Grindelwald, are just kind of generically evil: we don’t really understand what drives them, some kind of similar brand of Aryan superiority, but a little fuzzier. The Minstry of Magic seems completely incompetent, but then so is the hero of the series, Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander, who previously annoyed me by being a criminally negligent student of magical beasts. Here he isn’t as out of control, but instead he also declares that he will not take sides in the effort to track down the evil Grindelwald.The problem isn’t just that he is a reluctant hero, but that he doesn’t seem to even care. Meanwhile things are happening, more new characters are introduced, there are big CGI scenes of magic, and towards the end there is a fairly long story that is told with new details and characters, but really barely matters. The movie is overstuffed with characters and details, some of which has to tie in to the later world of Harry Potter, but it is hard to care about any of it. The problem is that the people we care about in this world are really Harry, Hermione, and Ron and they aren’t going to be born for 50 more years and will not appear in this series. The adult wizards have always been filler and they still are. In the later Harry Potter books there were a lot of flashbacks to the early days of Albus Dumbledore, Voldemort, and some of the other names behind the conflicts in the book series. To me that was always boring background on what Harry and his friends had to overcome. So this movie has all of these moving parts, but very few people to root for. Dumbledore (played by Jude Law) is barely in the movie and does almost nothing. But then when you think about it, almost nobody in the movie does anything, certainly nothing conclusive. Much of the rest of the movie is just setting up some characters for the next movie, while there is a big evil plan to … yawn. Still, there is finally something to get your interest at the end, making this seem like a 2-hour trailer for the movie that has just been released.
Written: 19 Apr 2022
Owned on: Digital