Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Heads up, if you haven’t watched the movie, do not proceed. If you don’t plan on watching it, good idea, please join me in this reasonable rant I am about to start, and if you have watched it- I bet you and I are bound to have some ideas in common.

If I’m being brutally honest, I was not looking forward to this.  My love for Harry Potter over the years has remained and kept alive through things like A Very Potter Musical and the occasional Buzzfeed quiz on which house you belong to according to your taste in movies, or something like that. And although I’ve read all the Harry Potter books, I’ve not read the Fantastic Beasts one so I went into the first movie knowing little to nothing, and I got out quite fine, I think. But this one, dear lord, do I have problems.

I’ll start with my biggest problem: who the actual hell is Aurelius Dumbledore? I’ve been known to forget things or read over tiny details in books, but I think I’d know if there was another Dumbledore mentioned. I knew of Ariana and Aberforth (and obviously Albus) but who is Aurelius? My first thought when they threw this curveball at us was you can’t change history! The Harry Potter books were brilliantly planned and structured with intricate details, but you can’t invent an actual character just to float the plot of your movie, damn. I was just filled with rage. I can go on forever about how annoyed I was that they decided to extend the Dumbledore family tree, but I’ll move on to other things.

The movie was so rushed and incomprehensive. They introduced us to an array of new characters including Theseus Scamander (Newt’s brother) and Nagini (in her human form, which came as a shock to me) but failed to give them any depth or meaning. Leta Lestrange, on the other hand, was given a tragic backstory, but just as we got to know her they killed her off, so what was the point of that in the first place? On a related note, Zoe Kravitz is incredibly beautiful. Leaving that aside, for now, even the recurring characters were given such little attention. Tina Goldstein merely existed as a poorly executed love interest, Jacob Kowalski was dragged in as a comedic aspect, and Queenie Goldstein went to the dark side. Which literally makes no sense. I understand other wizards and witches blindly following Grindelwald, but Queenie, who claims he wants the same thing she does, has the ability to read minds. She would have definitely figured out what he was up to and prevented a big mess. But, hey, don’t let me tell you how to run a movie.

I went in with zero expectations but I was still disappointed. Negativity aside, there were some aspects that I enjoyed. Starting with the CGI, it was beautiful and magical and I was really impressed. It was well done. Eddie Redmayne, as always, is good at everything he does, and he looks like a 12-year-old child so it’s hard to be mean to him. Not to mention the fact that the Harry Potter theme gives me goosebumps and makes me feel at home.

All this being said, I firmly believe someone who is not a Harry Potter fan would have enjoyed this movie. But a pale, zombie-looking Johnny Depp and an additional Dumbledore was too much for me to handle. I’m sorry if we don’t see eye-to-eye on this but Harry Potter was a big part of my life so I had a lot of opinions.