Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald – The Magic is Gone

The history of cinema can easily be divided into eras. You got the golden age of the 20’s and 30’s, the silver age of the 40’s and 50’s, the rise of the film brats in the 60’s and 70’s, and the blockbuster era of the 80’s through the 2000’s. If I were to give a name to the current era, it would be the age of the cinematic universe, since most blockbuster franchises nowadays are obsessed with minutia, continuity and worldbuilding. Marvel is what made it the new standard, but this trend can be traced back to Star Wars, and germinated with franchises like Terminator, Alien, Lord of the Rings, X-Men, sundry horror franchises, and of course, Harry Potter. Most of these series were able to maintain a loyal fanbase through characters and stories while keeping the foreshadowing and worldbuilding in the background. It’s when those things switch places that things start to go south, and the results are often disastrous. Sadly, that is the fate to fall upon Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the second in a planned five-movie saga.

To recap, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them takes place 60 years before Harry Potter is even born and follows Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a foppish magic zoologist who will go on to write the titular beast almanac. On one of his adventures he comes across and rescues an orphan named Credence (Ezra Miller) who was possessed by a dangerous parasite that’s only born from wizards who repress their magic. Credence, thought to be dead and having fled to Paris, is being hunted by the dark wizard Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), a proto-Voldemort who wants to rule over wizards and non-wizards alike, believing this boy is the only one powerful enough to defeat the only wizard capable of stopping him, Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law). Unable to face him himself because of plot contrivances, Dumbledore sends Newt to find and protect him, even though he’s under travel ban after nearly destroying New York in the last movie, so he must find Credence before Grindelwald does while evading the Ministry of Magic who want to kill Credence because they think he’s too dangerous.

The biggest problem with this movie is simple: too much plot, not enough story. This doesn’t feel so much like a moving narrative as an adaptation of its own Wikipedia page. It’s like they took all the tidbits about the Wizarding World that JK Rowling has dropped on Twitter throughout the years and cobbled them into an exquisite corpse of callbacks to the original, fanservice and tertiary retcons. Ever wondered who Voldemort’s pet snake really is? No? Well too bad, you’re finding out anyway. Ever wondered if they address Dumbledore’s sexuality at all? They do, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Half the cast from the original is back even though the script has to twist itself into pretzels to come up with reasons for them to be there. American Auror and quasi-love interest Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) is hunting down Credence and is mad at Newt because of a misprint in a gossip rag, Jacob Kowalski (Dan Folger) and his new fiancée Queenie (Alison Sudol) are there just because, and there’s a bizarre love triangle between Newt, his Auror brother Theseus (Callum Turner) and his fiancée Leta Lestrange (Zoe Kravitz), who had a fling with Newt back in their Hogwarts days.

The two halves of the title have little to do with each other, and neither of which are nearly interesting enough to keep you invested, especially when the plot gets really convoluted and practically demands your attention to keep track of it all. A lot of the mystery surrounding Credence has to do with his lineage, and to get there we have to go through an unnecessary amount of flashbacks and running around, only for another group of characters to jump in at the last fifteen minutes and explain what really happened with an expository dump that’s a mélange of conspiracies, blood feuds and infanticide, and while all this is going on, all I’m thinking is “Who the fuck are these people?” But wait, there’s more! Even that’s all moot because in the last thirty seconds, we get another fake out where another character christens him with his real name like he’s Emperor Palpatine knighting Anakin Skywalker after he iced Mace Windu. As for the “fantastic beasts” part of the title, they’re barely here. I liked Eddie Redmayne as this modest, semi-autistic wizard with a heart of gold who reluctantly gets roped into these adventures when all he really wants is be left alone with his creatures but ends up playing a bigger role than anticipated, but here they don’t give him much to do and is only really connected to the main plot by happenstance.

So, is there anything redeemable about this trash heap? Yes, actually. I found Grindelwald to be a pretty compelling villain. I’m probably in the minority here, but I always found Voldemort to be kind of a one-dimensionally evil villain like Emperor Palpatine or Sauron. Grindelwald is no less transparently evil, essentially being a magical fascist, but as twisted as he may be, he’s in the vein of modern movie villains like Kylo Ren, Killmonger and Thanos, in that you see the logic behind his motives and why someone would want to follow him, and considering that “logically sound” fascism is kind of on the rise, it’s pretty damn relevant. Even when one of the good guys suddenly decides to join him, there’s an understandable albeit weak reason behind their betrayal, and the heel turn moment captures the feeling of watching someone you love who should know better falls into a hate group. Of course, I wish they would’ve gone with someone other than Johnny Depp (I would’ve stuck with Colin Farrell and done away with that whole Scooby-Doo mask reveal from the last movie), but what’s done is done.

Bottom line, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is an overblown, unfocused, misbegotten mess of a movie. It felt like it had the same problem as the late Harry Potter movies where they tried to cram an 800-page book into two hours, except this is an original story, so that excuse doesn’t work here. Had they built this up more organically like they did with Harry Potter, I could see it working, but they put all their eggs in one basket and lost the plot in favor of promises that this will all supposedly make sense in the sequels. I don’t know if JK Rowling or Warner Bros. is responsible for it turning out this way, but I hope it’s the latter because if this keeps up, JK Rowling could be well on her way to becoming the next George Lucas.

3/10