So, I got to go see 'Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald' And it was really bad. The last time a Fantastic Beasts movie came out, I did a script doctor. And I made suggestions for improvement. I also thought the first one was like, an awkward start to what might someday mature into a decent series. Having seen the second one. No. It turns out, this one is actually a lot worse. So, this time around I'm just going to point out dumb things that happened and make fun of them for our mutual entertainment. I'm going to attempt to move in a vaguely linear fashion, as I try to recall everything I just saw in my frenzied brain. It's like I'm pulling memories from my head of Fantastic Beasts 2 and I'm putting them in a pensieve. And then, after my review I'm gonna take that pensieve and I'm gonna pour it down my garbage disposal. Also, a small disclaimer. I saw this at an early screening. Usually when I do a video about a movie, I go and see it a second time. And I take notes. I make sure I covered everything that I want to. I can't do that yet, so consequently, I just don't know the names of some of the characters. And I couldn't look it up, because the fan wikis don't have spoilers on them yet. So if I get names wrong, blame the movie for not conveying them well enough to me, honestly. If you haven't seen the movie: SPOILERS. But I still encourage you to stay because 1) I don't recommend that you see this movie. And 2) some of the events are so weird and stupid that you're going to think that I'm making them up. And I'm not. And I think the experience of hearing them secondhand might honestly be very funny for you. Okay, let's get right to it. #1: the opening scene. Did not take long to get to a dumb thing. This movie opens essentially the same way as the Dark Knight Rises. We see a bunch of characters we don't recognize discussing how they're going to move Grindelwald from one wizard prison to another. And they are going to move him using a flying horse carriage. Why don't they just use Side-Along Apparition? We don't know. Why don't they use the Floo Network or Portkeys? We don't know. Grindelwald stages an elaborate mid-air Bane-style breakout. It turns out the Grindelwald in jail wasn't Grindelwald? It was one of Grindelwald's followers, shape-shifted into Grindelwald. And now Grindelwald, disguised as his follower, is going to try to break out his follower, disguised as Grindelwald. How did they do the initial switch? That sounds like a much more exciting heist. I feel like some characters pronounced it Grindel-Vald. I don't feel like saying it that way. I assume this escape plan was some kind of clever chain reaction, but, honestly, it's shot very poorly, And you can't really tell what's going on. You just kind of get the vague impression of things whooshing around. A lizard is involved. After they succeed and they have the carriage to themselves, the lizard like crawls up onto Grindelwald's shoulder and nuzzles him affectionately. And Grindelwald, remarks on how loyal it is and then throws it out the window to its death. For no reason but to demonstrate that he's evil, I guess. If he's so self-serving and he doesn't care about his followers, why did he orchestrate that elaborate jailbreak of his follower? Like, why not just leave that guy in jail and then put miles between yourself and the authorities before they figure it out? #2: the events of this movie all appear to happen in the span of one day. That's not an inherently bad thing, but it's kind of funny if you keep it in mind moving forward because so many things happen in this one day. #3: Credence is alive. The Ministry of Magic called Newt into a board meeting and they're like: "Credence, the guy from the first movie, he's alive and we need you to go get him for some reason." And Newt is like, "But...Credence exploded." And they're just like, "NOPE! He's in Paris." They could have just referred to this as The Credence Revival, but I guess this is amateur hour. And when Newt is leaving, his brother goes in for a hug. And he whispers in his ear, "They're watching you." And I wanted Newt to just be like, "Okay? Ya know, that's nice. I'm a zookeeper, so..." 4: Newt isn't allowed to travel internationally and that ends up not mattering at all. In the meeting with the Ministry, they tell Newt that because of his reckless behavior in the last movie, he is not allowed to travel internationally. And, you would thing that in a movie about traveling abroad, this would be a huge obstacle of some kind. Like, I immediately thought we'd have that tiresome thing where he travels abroad and initially it's not a problem, but then at the climax of the movie when everything is converging, and it's the least convenient time, the wizard cops show up and they're like, "We told you not to travel abroad." And it, like, throws an additional wrench into things to cause drama. But no, it just literally never comes up again. Um, he spends the whole movie travelling abroad and the authorities never intervene. He never faces any legal repercussions. It might as well have never happened and saved us a scene. #5: Dumbledore. I will say this, Jude Law is a fantastic young Dumbledore. There are some lines where, like, the way he reads it is indistinguishable from the way Michael Gambon would have done it. Like, where he does the thing where he softens the inflection of his sentences at the end - that was all really good. Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter because Dumbledore should not have been in this movie. This is not Dumbledore's story and
he's absent from all of the important action of the plot. Just don't put him in this movie if you don't have anything for him to do yet, you're making like 25 of these, right? #6: Buddy? Newt has an assistant who's named like Buddy? And her only trait is that she has a crush on Newt. She, like, asks him to take his shirt off. She's in one scene and then she never comes back, what a thankless role. #7: Newt and Tina are in love now. At the end of the first movie, I kind of got the vibe that like Tina was interested in Newt, and that maybe that was going to be developed later. But the way Newt was played in the first movie, it kind of seemed like, at very least, He was a little too Nutty Professor to even think to consider Tina as a romantic interest. And at most Newt was perhaps not interested in women at all. But now in this movie it's like suddenly common knowledge among all the characters that Newt is interested in Tina. Like Jacob is trying to give him dating advice? Newt keeps making Freudian slips where he refers to Tina as beautiful? It''s really bizarre and worse still there's some stupid contrivance where Tina is initially mad at Newt, and then later you find out it's because a wizard magazine published an engagement announcement of Newt, uh, Newt's' brother and Zoe Kravitz. And, I guess there was like a mistake where they suggested that Newt was the one who was engaged. It's like, what is this a sitcom? They just never discussed this misunderstanding. And, like, what right does Tina even have to be angry? They weren't dating. #8: Jacob has his memory back. Jacob and Queenie show up at Newt's apartment and Jacob remembers Newt and all of their adventures from the first movie. Newt is even like, "How do you remember me? Your memory got erased in the first movie?" And Jacob is like that spell only erased bad memories, so all of my good memories of you and our friendship and our adventures remain. And that doesn't make sense, because then you could assume that other people in New York also remember magic, because I would imagine, no matter the circumstances, the realization that magic exists would carry some happiness with it. And, during the first movie, we saw Jacob and we saw that he had forgotten everything. I actually initially thought they were
going to do a clever thing here, because we find out later in the scene that Goldie has Jacob under an enchantment. So I was like, "Oh, oh, this is good. It's going to turn out that Jacob doesn't have his memories back." Like what if Queenie hunted him down, and she implanted new fake memories, so they could be together again. And like, they're happy, but it's not real so it's kind of creepy. And that would explain why the explanation of him having his memories back was bad, because it's supposed to be a fake explanation that sounds kind of fishy. But no, I was wrong. It turns out the mind-control spell was just to convince Jacob to elope to London with Queenie, and he really does have his memories back. Like, the bad explanation was real. So, can I just point out this developing pattern of undoing things from the first movie? These weren't inconsequential beats in the first movie, they were kind of the only parts with any emotional impact. This honestly makes it feel like the writing changed hands and, like, the writer of the sequel wasn't happy with some developments of the first movie and want to undo them. But this is entirely JK Rowling's vision, so the only explanations we have for this happening are: One) she's making everything up as she goes and will just undo massive plot developments on a whim, or two) she wanted to have the emotional impact of having these things happen without actually having to write around the ramifications of doing them. Both possibilities are pretty bad. #9: Hogwarts. At some point in the movie, the Aurors go to Hogwarts to ask Dumbledore if he will fight Grindelwald. And he says no, but the real point of this scene is just so they could walk into Hogwarts, and they can show Hogwarts. And, like, it plays the old theme music and you, the person in the audience, are like, "Oh, Hogwarts. I love Hogwarts." And they go into like a 10 minute, extended flashback scene of Zoe Kravitz's childhood at Hogwarts. And suddenly you're watching kids have adventures at Hogwarts again. I mean, the dialogue's a lot worse for some reason but the atmosphere is the same. On one hand, I like that they did that, because it was the only time I felt joy in all of my viewing experience, (and in all of 2018) but it's ultimately to the detriment of the movie, because it just makes you realize how much less you like what you're watching now. And frankly, the Zoe Kravitz flashback was weird. This movie is way too full flashbacks, and the flashbacks are way too long. Nothing that happens in this flashback is very important, especially since Zoe Kravitz dies at the end of this movie. Sorry, I did say spoilers. She dies. #10: Credence goes to the circus! So Credence works at a circus now. If you're wondering how a weird, sullen, socially inept, broke teenager went from exploding in a New York subway to working in a wizard circus in Paris... ...you are going to go to your grave wondering that, because they don't even give us any hints. When the movie starts he's already there and already in a romantic relationship with another circus performer: Nagini, the snake woman. Nagini's circus act is she can turn into a snake, which what kind of wizard circus is this? Why is Nagini in a freak show? Or even a novelty? Turning into animals this something wizards can just study hard and do in this universe. It's like hula hooping. Like, Nagini has a special curse where someday she will be permanently a snake, but that doesn't mean that the act of her turning into a snake right now will hold any additional novelty for an audience of wizards. I know being an animagus is considered kind of uncommon, but it's still implied that if you've grown up as a wizard, you've at least seen them around and consider them kind of normal. When McGonagall turns from a cat to a woman in front of a whole room of first-years, a lot of them don't even glance up from their homework. They certainly don't act like they've seen a dazzling circus feat performed. Hey, while I'm here, #11 is everything about Nagini. In another masterful instance of world-building, we find out in this movie that Voldemort's pet snake was once a woman who turned into a snake sometimes and then eventually she became permanent snake. And Voldemort owned her. JK Rowling claimed on Twitter that she
has had this backstory in mind for 20 years. You're a dirty liar, Jo. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you believed Nagini the snake was a circus woman in 1998. You know how she got the original idea for Harry Potter in a cafe, and she says she had to like grab a napkin and frantically write down her ideas. I like to think that if you see that original
napkin the only things on it are: Little boy wizard that lives in a cupboard, and the snake is a Korean lady. Look, I had already accepted that snakes exist and sometimes they're big. If there's one character in a story that I don't need a backstory for, it's the character that's just a really big snake. And it doesn't make any sense that this woman is named Nagini. It would make more sense if this woman was named Suzanna Chandler, and then 70 years from now Voldemort finds a snake and he names it Nagini. Why would he know her real name? Like I know he speaks Parseltongue, but unless Nagini is an easily translatable word in a dictionary, it's kind of hard to convey proper nouns through hissing noises. It's why snakes give such lousy driving
directions. #12: the Credence reveal. So the whole film, Credence has been
trying to find his birth family and everybody else has been trying to find
Credence for various reasons, some of which we never find out. There's this new character in this movie. His name is possibly Kama and it's possibly Karma, depending on who was saying it - it sound different every time. And I'm already at a disadvantage because I'm American and they all have British accents. Karma's motivating drive is that he wants to kill Credence and we don't know why. And the whole movie everyone's like, "Why does he want to kill Credence?" It's not a mystery that I'm invested in but they want us to be. So near the end of the movie, all paths converge and we have Newt Scamander and Tina and Karma and Nagini and Credence. And they're all in one mausoleum and Karma's like, "I'm gonna kill Credence." And Newt's like, "No, why do you want to do that?" And so we find out the story. And what is about to unfold is not only the funniest part of this movie, but probably the funniest thing I've seen in a movie all year. To be honest, in a list of bad things in this movie, this wouldn't even be on the list, because it was my favorite part. But this is a list of stupid things so it has more than earned it's place. Please know that in the movie, this explanation goes on for what feels like 20 minutes, and was probably, in actuality, 10 minutes, which is still really long. The events of this film just go on pause so that we can get this backstory. I'm gonna change my battery first. This is gonna be like 10% of the video. So, when Karma was a little boy, a white man fell in love with mother, a happily married black woman, and decided to kidnap her. He put her under the Imperius curse and married her. And then non-consensually had a child with her. I feel like there's a word for that. So that's what was missing from the magical adventures of Harry Potter. So Karma's mom dies in childbirth and that baby...is not Credence, it's Zoe Kravitz. Yeah, Zoe Kravitz was playing a Lestrange in this movie, and I guess this was supposed to be some kind of twist reveal for why a non-white actress was playing a character from a predominantly white family. I hadn't felt like I needed a reveal. I've just kind of been like, "Yeah, okay, guess it's a big family." No, it's a reveal, we get a reveal, so cool. So Zoe is like, "Why don't you want to kill
me? Why would you want to kill Credence? What does this have to do with Credence?" And then there's more. It turns out that Karma made an Unbreakable Vow to his father that he would get revenge on Mr. Lestrange for kidnapping his mother by killing someone that Lestrange loved. And he doesn't love Zoe. He just never loved her. But, he remarried. And with his second wife he had another baby, and I think that wife also died in childbirth? Why are so many witches dying in childbirth? Don't they have like amazing health magic? Okay, so Mr. Lestrange does love this second baby, but for some reason he was like, he knew Karma wanted revenge. So to stop himself from being vulnerable for loving his baby, he decided to send his baby away to America to live in an orphanage in America. And that baby was Credence, so he wants to kill Credence. But wait, Zoe Kravitz says, there's more. As Zoe and her nanny and the baby were sailing to America to put the baby in an orphanage, Zoe was extremely stressed, because during the long boat voyage the baby kept crying and crying. So one night, when the nanny wasn't looking, she took the baby and she went down the hall to another cabin with another baby, that was a quiet baby and she switched the babies. The babies happened to look just like each other, they also happened to both be wearing identical blue pajamas. So the babies are switched but then immediately after switching the babies we find out that the ship is sinking. And that ship was the Titanic. Okay I don't actually know that it was the Titanic, but I felt like it was the Titanic. And I think the timeline checks out. So Zoe Kravitz's real brother drowned in front of her when his life boat capsized, and now she and her nanny were left with the fake baby, which they then also left in an orphanage, for like double confusion. And that fake baby is Credence. And that fake baby is also Dumbledore's secret extra brother. Small boat, right? Two famous wizard families right down the hall from each other with two identical blue-pajamed babies. It was at this point that I thought about how, at all the preview screenings, they were asking people to "protect the secret." It was like their cute way of saying not to share spoilers. It was like #ProtectTheSecrets. And sitting there in the theater, in this moment, I was like, "What secrets am I meant to protect?" Even if I wanted to spoil this, frankly I don't know where I would begin. You know that clip that became a meme of somebody at a midnight release doing like a drive-by spoiling of the sixth Harry Potter book? (in clip:) Man: Hey! Snape kills Dumbledore. (in clip:) Girl: Nooooo. I started imagining somebody trying to do that with this novel length baby switcheroo plot. They just slow the car to a crawl and ease by for like ten minutes as they're hoarsely shouting out the window, trying to explain how this all went down. They, like, have a notebook out and they're trying to draw a family tree to illustrate it more clearly, And then, at the end, the people outside the car just like, "Which one's Credence again?" #13: Grindelwald's plan, whatever that is. Okay, Grindelwald's plan is: Get lackey to replace me in prison, Break that lackey out of prison, Hide away in Paris, Get Credence, Do a spell that covers Paris in black fabric and then tells people where I'm going to hold a rally, so the authorities that I've been trying to hide from can find me, And then I can give a speech with no clear mission statement and then leave. At Grindelwald's rally, his followers come out and they're holding a glowing orb And he vapes out of the glowing orb and then he blows out really hard, and then in the cloud it shows the future. He does this twice in the movie, it's not explained either time. And in his vision cloud, it shows premonitions of World War II. Like, I think it shows, like, the London bombings, it shows an image of a nuclear bomb going off, as if Wizards in the 1920s have any capacity to comprehend what an atom bomb is - or any reason to be intimidated by it when they can make force fields and teleport. And then they show bunch of sad people walking in a group, which I believe was meant to convey the idea of concentration camps. So, okay, I have questions. Are you telling me that Grindelwald's mission statement is he wants to stop the Holocaust? And Newt Scamander and his whimsical animals and his comic relief sidekick, they're all going to stop Grindelwald from stopping the Holocaust? When the wizards at this rally see the imagery of World War II, they're like, "No, not another war!" Because World War I was terrible and obviously it's still fresh for everybody. But honestly what threat could any Muggle war hold for wizards? When you're at war with another wizard , it's difficult because wizards have countermeasures against other wizards. But with a Muggle, it's just like...what can they even do? Wizards can just go anywhere, kill anyone, heal any injury stop any Muggle weapon from getting to them. The elephant in the room is if you have a wizard story intersect with the timeline of World War II, you kind of have to acknowledge that wizards could have stopped it if they existed and if they wanted to. The Harry Potter books were set after World War II, so they just kind of didn't touch it, but if you're going to bring World War II into your story, you kind of have to think of a justification for why your good guy wizards, in all their infinite power, didn't do anything to intervene and stop all of the atrocities against humanity that were committed during World War II. I know wizards are supposed to be secret, but, like, I don't actually know why they're supposed to be secret. Because the muggles pose no threat, so they could just be like, "We're wizards, you're gonna have to be okay with that." Also, speaking of World War II, there's all this shorthand in the narrative about Grindelwald and his people being kinda like Nazis, and you might be like, "Wait a second, I thought Voldemort and his people were like Nazis?" And you are correct. It just- I think JK Rowling can only write one kind of villain. So Grindelwald is an allegorical Nazi who wants to stop the Holocaust and, also Queenie, a Jewish character, joins Grindelwald. You know how everybody was asking JK Rowling to like diversify her characters? And then she wrote a black lady who gets kidnapped into slave marriage, and a Korean lady who turns into a snake slave, and a Jewish woman who joins the Nazis. It's like a monkey's paw thing. Like, be careful what you wish for, it's gonna end up twisted somehow. It's like how I wished for JK Rowling to write more wizard stories and she wrote Fantastic Beasts. #14: No-Maj. This is a little thing, and it was in the last movie too, but I think it's so stupid that American wizards call muggles No-Majs. During Grindelwald's speech, he's like listing out all of the different terms for muggles. So he says muggle, No-Maj, No-Magick - which is the French word for No-Maj. And, I swear to God, one of the phrases he said was like "can't spell." The "can't spells." Why would different countries even have different words for it? Like, and you're telling me that only England thought of a fun word? I mean, I get it we have fries and they have chips but those are both shorthand slang words that are easy to say. It's not like they call them chips and we call them "potatoes-which-have-been-cut" #15: Motivation. None of these characters have any good motivations. As I said, Grindelwald's motivations are totally unclear. I don't even actually know what he wants or how he intends to get it. Most of the supporting characters are
cops, so they're just kind of doing their
jobs. Credence wants to find his family, something he didn't seem to care about at all in the last movie. Nagini doesn't want anything. I guess she wants to stand near Credence and look concerned for him, that's kind of the extent of her involvement in the movie. Tina is a cop on assignment. Newt's brother is a cop on assignment. Zoe Kravitz is a cop on assignment. And she's in love with Newt, but that doesn't really drive any of her actions. Newt doesn't seem to have any motivations. He even tells his brother...um, Clancy? I feel like his brother's name was Clancy. He tells his brother that he doesn't want to join the Ministry and he doesn't want to help them. He doesn't care about their problems. He doesn't like to pick sides, which, oh, what a good trait for a protagonist. There's no sense of any emotional investment from him and what's happening. He and Grindelwald don't have any beef with each other, they're not opposed on any ideology. I guess he has a vague, impersonal dislike of Grindelwald the way you probably do for, like, John Wayne Gacy. Harry Potter's villain killed his family. Even the lesser villains terrorized his school or harassed his friends. Every time Harry thwarts Voldemort, the feud gets more intense. What does Newt have on Grindelwald? What part of Grindelwald's worldview does Newt oppose? I guess he probably opposes the part about throwing lizards out windows for no reason. Grindelwald does kill some Muggles in this movie, but none of our main characters find out about that. I don't even actually know what, at this point in the timeline, Grindelwald is infamous for. Like when he's revealed at the end of the first movie, everyone's like, "The evil wizard Grindelwald." And it's like I don't know what he's done yet. What are the crimes of Grindelwald, they never told me? I mean, he assembles without a permit at the end. I don't know wizarding Paris's laws about that. Why is Newt involved in any of this? His animals are not part of the story anymore, so why not just leave this to the professionals? Even that Karma guy that wants to kill Credence, he's not motivated by anything dramatic. Like, he swore an Unbreakable Vow to his father so he will die if he doesn't kill Credence, but he doesn't actually seem to have any personal beef with him. The only character right now who seems like they could have any kind of complex emotional stake in the Grindelwald drama is Dumbledore. The idea that he and Grindelwald were former lovers is compelling and could create drama. But they even ruin that because they added this weird no-homo lore. Dumbledore and Grindelwald, in their boyhood, like clasped hands and used magic to make some kind of special friendship necklace. And as long as that necklace is around, magic says that neither of them can fight the other one. But if you destroy the necklace, perhaps you can. So now it's like a destroy-the-necklace story, instead of a I-have complex-feelings-about-possibly-having-to-murder-my-now-evil-former-best-friend-and-maybe-lover story Meanwhile, Queenie's motivation is that she wants to marry Jacob, and so she joins Grindelwald because he tells her some vague line about people should be able to love whoever they want. But Jacob is a Muggle, and Grindelwald's primary trait is his desire to kill all Muggles. He kinda can't be both, Queenie. And how does it make sense that she joined the cause for Jacob, but then at the end he yells at her for joining the cause and flees? And then she still goes and joins the cause? Besides, how is Queenie so easily duped about Grindelwald's motivations when she can read minds? Is she just a big idiot? I mean, probably. So that's my list. Now allow me to make my savage closing complaints. This movie is so bad. In hindsight, it probably had an after credit stinger, but I left as soon as it ended. A whole row of people in front of me got up and left while Grindelwald was actively fighting the heroes. Like, they didn't even want to see how it ended. They didn't even stick around to see who lived. This was a preview screening. For fans. I haven't heard a lot of kind words about this movie. And frankly, I hope it underperforms and just sinks this franchise once and for all. Not the whole Harry Potter franchise or the whole broad concept of a Wizarding World Expanded Universe. I just think JK Rowling as a screenwriter is demonstrably not working. The movie constantly jumps between different characters, you don't know any of them that well, you don't care about any of them. And yet, it still tells you everybody's backstory and lore, presuming that that is information you want to know. I think JKR was misled by the fact that after the Harry Potter series wrapped up, fans were begging to know more about those characters. And she took that to mean "fans love deep lore all the time, no matter what." She didn't really make the connection that fans wanted to know more about Pansy Parkinson or what became of Neville Longbottom because they had already formed an emotional attachment to these characters and the world felt real to them. You can't just toss lore at people without building the groundwork first to make them care about the lore. And this movie is just too packed with characters that it cannot devote time to developing. I mean, look at the poster. No poster should have that many characters. Nobody knows who these people are. This movie is a mess. It doesn't have a rising action, it just has a lot of stuff that doesn't escalate and then a climax. I kind of get the vibe that JKR handed in like five hours of script and then they cut as much as they could without rendering it completely incoherent. And the end result is a movie that's just characters reciting their backstory, twists, reveals, and characters arriving at and then leaving various locations. I think it could have been good if she had just written it as books and then it was turned into movies after. Because then she could just get all her points down, and then an experienced screenwriter that understands pacing could have translated it to the screen in a graceful manner. But nobody's going to tell Jo that. She's like richer than the Queen and probably has a lot of contractual power. So it's kind of just on everybody, like the general public, to just not see the movie. I mean, can you imagine if they just stopped making these movies before they hit the end? Like Divergent, they just stopped in the middle of the story because it didn't make enough money. But that's probably never going to happen because there is that core demographic, and I understand I am part of that demographic, where you grew up with Harry Potter, and now you just feel obligated to see every Harry Potter thing, whether you enjoy it or not. These people will just keep showing up no matter how many you churn out, no matter how bad they get. They're trapped. But just imagine one day JK Rowling releases her next screenplay then you're paging through it, and you suddenly turn the page and instead of more writing, there's just an old gray sock. And you realize it's over. Master has given Dobby a sock. Dobby is free. Finally, I have to say that I think it's morally reprehensible to have Johnny Depp in this movie. I mean, it's bad enough to dig up a corpse, but to slather makeup on it so it looks vaguely human, and then poke it with a stick so that it shambles around attempting to deliver dialogue? It's just inhumane.
Don't think I'll be seeing the movie after watching this. Well.. like at least till it comes on dvd.. Then I might just watch it online. Don't want to fuel the beast, but still want more from the HP universe!