undercooked sunday roast

Watched Fan­tas­tic Beasts and The Crimes of Grindel­wald (2018), in which Grindel­wald doesn’t do much. While I like most of the char­ac­ters be­ing fur­ther de­vel­oped and the film is over­all well di­rect­ed, the weak­est el­e­ment was the sto­ry, writ­ten by J. K. Rowl­ing. I’m sor­ry to dis­agree with the gen­uine fans of the se­ries, but this film is a gi­gan­tic mess.

Start­ing with the pos­i­tive, I quite en­joyed the few main char­ac­ters. New­ton Sca­man­der is so­cial­ly awk­ward and con­nects bet­ter with an­i­mals, but has a heart of gold and is very good at his in­ter­est (an­i­mal keep­ing). That’s not dif­fer­ent from the first, but he’s a type of char­ac­ter I re­al­ly like. 

Jude Law’s Dum­b­le­dore was on point, and I hope to see him play­ing a big­ger role. John­ny Depp’s Grindel­wald was not ter­ri­ble, but he didn’t look in­vest­ed in the role as much and was just read­ing the lines. To be fair, he wasn’t giv­en enough ma­te­r­i­al to shine. And that’s as much praise as I have for the film. The char­ac­ters we al­ready knew are great.

By this point, it seems clear that Rowling’s writ­ing strength is in char­ac­ters and wealth of ideas for in­di­vid­ual scenes, but not nar­ra­tive struc­ture. That has al­ways been my prob­lem with the se­ries, and my favourite en­try was the only co-writ­ten one, The Cursed Child (2016). Her struc­ture prob­lem shows in in this film the lack of clear rea­son for many char­ac­ters’ ac­tions, if not existence. 

Op­po­site the Har­ry Pot­ter se­ries which usu­al­ly has only one plot line, Crimes of Grindel­wald has ap­prox­i­mate­ly sev­en sub­plots. Each one feels weak and con­trived, hard to fol­low, and none feels more im­por­tant than the other.

The slop­py writ­ing is shown not only in each char­ac­ter de­vel­op­ment, or how mag­ic is over/underused to the con­ve­nience of the plot. Mag­i­cal el­e­ments of the sto­ry con­stant­ly break the rules it sets, and acts as a tool to serve the whim of the writer. 

That was a prob­lem with all Har­ry Pot­ter en­tries and es­pe­cial­ly the last film which de­val­u­at­ed wands to mere firearms and tele­por­ta­tion de­vices (the in­tro­duc­tion of wand ap­pari­tion is so in­fu­ri­at­ing), and it is es­pe­cial­ly no­tice­able when some­one fails be­cause they did not use mag­ic. I couldn’t even get past the first five min­utes with­out full of ques­tions in my head.

An­oth­er prob­lem with HP sto­ry struc­ture was the plot re­veal at the end, where a bad guy ex­plains every­thing that’s been hap­pen­ing the whole time, spend­ing a chap­ter or two be­fore at­tempt­ing to kill Harry. 

This is nor­mal­ly how a de­tec­tive nov­el would be struc­tured (e.g. Sher­lock Holmes con­nects every­thing to­geth­er at the end), and al­ready this felt quite con­trived but for­giv­en in the orig­i­nal books, be­cause a child stu­dent might not wit­ness every­thing the sto­ry needs. Here, we have tons of Au­rors (i.e. mag­ic po­lice de­tec­tives) and an an­i­mal spe­cial­ist who Dum­b­le­dore deems ca­pa­ble of his ‘search & de­stroy’ mis­sions, and Rowl­ing still can­not let them dis­cov­er the sto­ry by them­selves and uses the same trope. The re­veal it­self is so in­cred­i­bly con­trived and com­pli­cat­ed, and still makes no sense, prob­a­bly the worst in the se­ries. And it be­comes in­creas­ing­ly ap­par­ent that Newt Sca­man­der has no per­son­al stake in the story.

My com­plaints can go on and on. The writ­ing re­mind­ed me of Juras­sic World: The Fall­en King­dom (2018), which is not a com­pli­ment – be­cause Rowl­ing is known for her writing. 

I think the clos­est par­al­lel I can draw is George Lu­cas, who had be­come so Big and Fa­mous to chal­lenge by the time he got around to mak­ing Star Wars Episode One – and no­body ques­tioned his cre­ative de­ci­sions. That led to a bor­ing and in­co­her­ent pre­quel trilogy. 

Any cre­ative per­son should un­der­stand the val­ue of ex­tra pair(s) of eye­balls to cri­tique on your work. J. K. Rowl­ing des­per­ate­ly needs to have some, and she does a re­mark­able job when she does. In my opin­ion, The Cursed Child is the best Har­ry Pot­ter be­cause of that (and the most mis­un­der­stood one be­cause they pub­lished the script, an un­fa­mil­iar form of writ­ing for most people). 

The Crimes of Grindel­wald is a thin and un­der­cooked Sun­day roast, cov­ered by a much thick­er lay­er of gravy sauce of cre­ative tal­ents and fan service. 

And what is the crimes of Grindel­wald? The film does not show, just like the first film didn’t show where to find fan­tas­tic beasts. 4.5/10

 

And here’s some spoil­er­rif­ic questions/discussions to those who have al­ready seen the movie:
·  Grindel­wald swaps his body with his fol­low­er and goes to res­cue him, but he is shown to have no com­pas­sion just like Volde­mort. Why did he both­er to go af­ter the horse cargo?
·  Why didn’t the es­corts on broom­sticks do any­thing to Grindelwald?
·  Why did Grindel­wald save the British min­is­ter of magic?
·  Ja­cob clear­ly had his mem­o­ry erased in the last film but it was ap­par­ent­ly ‘only the bad ones.’ Then there should be so many peo­ple who re­mem­ber wit­ness­ing mag­ic in New York. Was any­one con­vinced by this plot point?
·  Nagi­ni is ab­solute­ly use­less in the sto­ry. Be­ing able to turn into an­i­mals is not a rare abil­i­ty. Why does that work as a cir­cus at­trac­tion to witch­es and wiz­ards? She not only does noth­ing for the rest of the film, and the fact that the snake was hu­man hurts the main HP sto­ry a lot. The point of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween Volde­mort and Nagi­ni was that he trust­ed an­i­mals (par­tic­u­lar­ly snakes) more than hu­mans, not be­cause Nagi­ni had a spe­cial back­ground. Also, Neville Long­bot­tom de­cap­i­tat­ed a lady.
·  Grindel­wald is shown to have no mer­cy to­wards his as­so­ciates, which is a re­cy­cled Volde­mort char­ac­ter, but he wants to pre­vent World War II by con­quer­ing the mug­gle so­ci­ety. Those two don’t work to­geth­er. It also es­tab­lish­es that the mag­ic com­mu­ni­ty could have stopped the World War II and the main char­ac­ters let it hap­pen at the end. And there is noth­ing in­ter­est­ing about a vil­lain whose mo­ti­va­tion is not clear.
·  Quee­nie comes to Paris and fails to find both her sis­ter and the Newt & Ja­cob duo, as if she is in­ca­pable of us­ing mag­ic. She is then in­vit­ed to Grindelwald’s hide­out so that she is told where to go at the cli­max of the film. She joins the team Grindel­wald, a group who plans to an­ni­hi­late mug­gles, be­cause she loves one. It hurts my brain as I type this sen­tence. I like how she cre­ates split in the main char­ac­ters’ re­la­tion­ships, but every­thing she does is dumb.
·  The archivist with the cats also tar­gets Leta, who vis­it­ed the place via of­fi­cial means. The cam­era stays on the archivist’s face for too long, sug­gest­ing that she has her own agen­da (which turns out to be false). And Leta at­tack her cats al­though she has ab­solute­ly no rea­son to do so.
·  Ja­cob vis­its the grave­yard and is stopped by Yusuf Kama. Next time the film cuts to them, Ja­cob is nowhere to be seen and Yusuf is con­fronting Cree­dence and Nagini.
·  Why did Yusuf need to ex­ist in this sto­ry? Seems like he could have been eas­i­ly cut out. His eye in­fec­tion doesn’t serve any pur­pose oth­er than giv­ing false ten­sion, and he wants to kill Cree­dence more than Leta, who is a much eas­i­er tar­get. Also, giv­en that the Lestrange should be large fam­i­ly in this uni­verse, there should be plen­ty of oth­er low hang­ing fruits if he need­ed to kill some­one that fits his purpose.
·  Leta Lestrange and Yusuf Kama’s back­grounds are FUBAR. This whole mess par­tial­ly comes from reusing Lestrange name and hir­ing non-white actors.
·  So, Leta swapped a baby that didn’t stop cry­ing, with an­oth­er who con­ve­nient­ly wore the same out­fit, con­ve­nient­ly in THE TI­TAN­IC, con­ve­nient­ly on the day that the ship sank, and con­ve­nient­ly lost her true broth­er to waves? And by the way, both Leta’s and Corvus’s moth­ers died af­ter birth?
·  The fi­nal con­fronta­tion is also a big mess. The main char­ac­ters were lured into the place, which sug­gests that Grindel­wald had plans for them. They are trapped in an en­closed space where they can­not es­cape, but Au­rors just ca­su­al­ly walk in. Then, he re­veals his plan to his Parisian fol­low­ers and con­vinces them to join his fas­cist cause. He sum­mons big blue fire drag­ons with the in­tent to de­stroy the whole of Paris, the home­town of the fol­low­ers h’s just gar­nered. All through the scene, Grindel­wald pays no par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion to the main char­ac­ters he trapped, and the fact that they were there feels in­ci­den­tal. What was his plan? And when every­one was af­ter Grindel­wald, why did he have to lure them? They would come to him anyway.
·  Creedence’s true iden­ti­ty turned out to be a Dum­b­le­dore who had nev­er been men­tioned, as if Al­bus didn’t have enough sib­ling prob­lem. To make the back­ground a bit more sol­id, the film in­tro­duces a lit­tle baby bird in the mid­dle of the film out of nowhere, which Cree­dence seemed have been car­ry­ing along. Just like the Dum­b­le­dore re­veal it­self, the bird had no set-up.
·  Newt Sca­man­der is some­one who is good with an­i­mals and does not be­long to Hog­warts or the Min­istry, which is con­ve­nient for Dum­b­le­dore. Apart from that, there is no per­son­al con­flict be­tween Newt and Grindel­wald and the sto­ry fo­cus is al­ready shift­ing to­wards Dum­b­le­dore. I re­al­ly like the char­ac­ter, and he de­served his own story.
 
 

—toshi oma­gari

Flom­mist Toshi Oma­gari fights many things, most re­cent of which is the auto-cor­rec­tion of his ti­tle to florist. Copy­right © 2018 Toshi Omagari.

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