11/1/2023 0 Comments Fantastical beasts movieHe’s been tasked with hunting Grindelwald by his old teacher Albus Dumbledore (an underused Jude Law), who is posted up at the famous school of Hogwarts. His pals Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), and Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol) are also in tow, as is his brooding old flame Leta Lestrange (Zoë Kravitz). Into all of this wanders Scamander, a magical zoologist with a suitcase full of bizarre creatures. Credence, meanwhile, is trying to solve the mystery of his parentage, surrounded by rumors that he’s a long-lost relative of a mighty wizarding family he’s accompanied by Nagini (Claudia Kim), a circus performer who occasionally turns into a snake and, as any Potter fan can guess, will permanently shift into that state one day. He’s on the lookout for Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), the unsettled magical orphan of the last Fantastic Beasts, whose powers have grown. But he just looks like a knockoff You Know Who, a similarly skeletal, high-cheekboned monster who delivers every line with a practiced sort of drawl.Īs the film begins, Grindelwald escapes from prison and moves to Paris much of his arc involves selecting the proper palatial apartment and gathering the right balance of henchmen. Grindelwald is supposed to be a magnetic demagogue, one gathering strength around the world by preaching a radical manifesto of wizard supremacy over the non-magical. Unfortunately, Depp has neither the energy nor the charisma for the role. A sort of wizard Hitler and proto-Voldemort, Grindelwald was largely a background bit of lore from the Harry Potter books who is now being fleshed out. Specifically, it’s worried about Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), whose very existence was the shocking twist at the end of the first Fantastic Beasts. There’s probably a sweet, winsome movie that could be made about Newt Scamander’s adventures with magical creatures in the roaring ’20s, but this film is concerned with far more than that. Her work is no longer just being adapted-she’s the only credited screenwriter, pouring a wealth of ideas and lore about her expansive universe into a mold that doesn’t have the space for it. But when it comes to Fantastic Beasts, Rowling is the sole auteur. When Yates came aboard the Wizarding World train in 2007 for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, he brought with him a surprisingly delightful visual sense (I still think fondly of that Voldemort–Dumbledore duel that ended in Cornelius Fudge’s image being shredded with glass). Perhaps worst of all, it retains the same washed-out aesthetic as the last movie, sticking to a color palette of dull limestone despite supposedly being set in a decades-old realm of magic and wonder. The movie isn’t lacking in characters, adding several newcomers to the already robust Fantastic Beasts ensemble, and yet nobody gets much to do. The Crimes of Grindelwald is not short (it runs a healthy 134 minutes), and yet it feels like barely anything happens in it. Directed by David Yates, the movie is less a fantasy epic and more a data download, giving out just enough background information to keep fans sated until the next Fantastic Beasts drops in 2020. But that subtitle, The Crimes of Grindelwald, has all the sizzle of an appendix entry and says everything one might need to know going in. It’s been dressed up as a sequel in the Fantastic Beasts series, starring the squirrelly and introverted Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and set in the 1920s. This is a film that exists primarily to answer questions nobody would have ever thought to ask about a series of books that already told a very complete story. Rowling is swerving dangerously close to George Lucas territory. With the release of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, it’s safe to say that the Harry Potter author J. Story took a backseat to explanation, and characters seemed to exist only to be related to future characters in some way. There came a certain point in George Lucas’s career, as he began writing prequels to his Star Wars films and tinkering with reedited “special editions” of the originals, when he finally lost all grasp on narrative momentum and became a glorified encyclopedia editor.
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