It's been almost a month since I blogged, but believe me, there have been reasons, including health-related ones. However, since I'm now convalescing, it's time to get back in the saddle. There has been no lack of material on the nerdy spectrum of culture consumption lately. I'll start with a comparatively unambitious subject: the latest Fantastic Beasts film.
I really should have seen coming that this part of the Harry Potter franchise would run out of steam, fast. When the first film in this series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, was announced, it did seem like they were scraping the Wizarding World barrel, and I was all set to be scathing about it. As it happened, though, this film won me over, and I didn't even balk at the studio's ambition of making five films based on the flimsiest of material. However, the series already lost its way in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald with its many, overcomplicated plot strands, and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, while easier to follow, was decidedly underwhelming. So where did the Fantastic Beasts films go wrong? Was the franchise doomed from the start?
With hindsight, I would argue that there was little chance of pulling off a Fantastic Beasts quintology. There simply aren't enough exciting adventures you could send Newt Scamander, awkward magic zoologist and ostensible hero of the franchise, on. Many commentators have noted how the Fantastic Beasts films have tried to push together two wildly differing storylines in the same film series – one about Newt Scamander's attempts to protect magic wildlife and keep them in check; one about the rise of evil wizard Gellert Grindelwald and the problems facing chief goody Albus Dumbledore when he tries to stem these dark developments without confronting Grindelwald head-on (they made a blood pact once which prevents them from directly going up against each other). The solution to Fantastic Beasts' problems, it has been suggested, would have been to pick a plot. Let the Fantastic Beasts films be about fantastic beasts, and Newt, and leave Wizarding World politics out of it. Possibly, the Dumbledore-Grindelwald relationship could form its own spin-off series, without Newt in it.
I see the merit of this argument. Even if Dumbledore is fond of picking champions with no personal ambitions, the bungling Newt does become increasingly implausible as Dumbledore's agent and the Wizarding World's Big Hope. He cares about his animals most of all, and though his knowledge of magic beasts sometimes comes in handy, you do wonder why Dumbledore couldn't have chosen some other luckless wizard to do his bidding. However, I understand why J.K. Rowling and the studio tried to combine the Fantastic Beasts plot with the Grindelwald vs Dumbledore plot – I'm not sure there is enough material in either of these plot lines to fill a trilogy of films on its own, let alone a quintology. As Newt's adventures take place at the same time as Grindelwald is trying to take over the Wizarding World, it makes sense to try to combine the two storylines. Also, I have to admit that at the end of the day, I find Grindelwald's and Dumbledore's relationship more interesting than magic critters. For someone who hasn't read the Harry Potter books, this part of Harry Potter lore was always puzzling as the films didn't offer much of an explanation of who this Grindelwald fellow was or just how close he was to Dumbledore.
Nevertheless, the execution has been lacking, as the Fantastic Beasts franchise has failed to make the most of what was best in the two storylines. What chiefly charmed me in the first film was the new quartet of main characters: Newt himself, his love interest Tina (who's almost as awkward as he is), non-magical baker and general good guy Jacob Kowalski and Queenie, Tina's blonde bombshell sister who endearingly falls for Jacob. In Crimes of Grindelwald, we still get a goodish bit of interaction between these four characters. In Secrets of Dumbledore, though, they are split up on different side quests most of the time. We hardly get to see anything of Tina who's apparently too "busy" to help stop the super-dangerous Grindelwald. Queenie, who's joined Grindelwald's side in the hope that he will legalise marriages between magic and non-magic folk (as opposed to killing all the "no-majes", as seems to be his real plan), spends most of the film isolated and being torn. Side characters are thrown in to make up for the lack of quartet interaction, but it doesn't really come off (what was Yusuf's part of the plan again?). Other relationships it could have been interesting to explore, such as the sibling rivalry between Newt and his brother Theseus, are also underdeveloped.
As for the Grindelwald-Dumbledore part of the plot, we do get one scene between them where they reminisce about old times, which is nice. Mads Mikkelsen does his best as a new version of Grindelwald, and is believable enough as an old flame of Jude Law's Dumbledore and as someone who does one-on-one persuasions well. Now, I liked Johnny Depp as Grindelwald in The Crimes of Grindelwald – I'd say he was one of that film's saving graces – but he was so weirdly made up, he never had the chance to pull off the "Dumbledore's ex-boyfriend" part of the character, though he was a convincing demagogue. It was easier to think "I get you, Albus" when the not-weirdly-made-up Mikkelsen was doing his stuff. The main problem with the switch (from an on-screen perspective) was that you never got the impression that Depp's Grindelwald and Mikkelsen's Grindelwald were one and the same person.
But what was worse was that they decided to go down the most boring route imaginable when it came to Grindelwald – that of the Hitler parallel. Real Nazis are dull enough in a fictional context, as there's no nuance or other side of the argument to be had: they're just evil. Arguably, though, it's even worse from a dramatic point of view to use some kind of I-can't-believe-it's-not-Nazis antagonists, where we are supposed to transfer our negative feelings about Nazis onto the fictional antagonists because, huh, we can see it's the same kind of thing, right? I didn't care for the "Spice is drugs" shorthand in The Book of Boba Fett, and I don't care for these analogies either. Let villains be condemned on their own merits. In The Secrets of Dumbledore, the German wizard-in-charge Vogel decides to let Grindelwald take part in an election, arguing that he'll never gather enough support to win it, and Dumbledore laments that Vogel decided to do "the easy thing rather than the right one". Really? Blocking Grindelwald from running would have been "the right thing"? Isn't that rather "the easy thing"?
For all the criticism that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald got, I had the feeling (I only saw it once, with a pair of ill-functioning 3-D glasses that made me giddy) that it was more creatively bad than Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. It had some interesting ideas, even if they didn't go anywhere. The Secrets of Dumbledore just felt tired. I'm afraid it's time to put this magic beast of a spin-off franchise to sleep.
