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Just some fanart I made for my comic

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Fantastic Beasts the Crimes of Grindewald Review

Summary

For the most part, to be honest I didn’t like the film. I didn’t outright hate it like most, but considering it in the grand scheme of the Harry Potter universe and not even considering the books but the films there seemed to be something subpar about the movie in comparison to the others. That being said, I am biased somewhat because I adore Harry Potter. Growing up it was my childhood, I loved Hermione and Ron and Harry and all the adventures they went through. I also really like the first Fantastic Beasts movie, maybe it wasn’t my favourite of all time but it started as a good starting point for what seemed a potentially interesting series, at that point, I didn’t consider it that much of a prequel in the sense of it being prequelesque. It is with a heavy heart then that I was disappointed in the film, and decide now to describe and rant about it. 

SPOILER WARNING NOW

The good 

For the most part, the enjoyable part for me was because of the characters. I myself prefer good characters over a good plot, mainly because I figure in order to be invested in a character and in the plot you need to foremost be invested in the characters first. Ideally, of course, you should have both working for you, with the plot bringing out the characters and their traits so you’re more invested in them. 

That being said, I did like the characters enough from the first movie enough to go see the movie again. I thought all the actors, for the most part, did well in their roles: Eddie Redmayne will always be the best Newt there will ever be and I love New Scamander as a character and as a protagonist. I also though Jude Law was great as a young Dumbledore and wish he got more screen time. Johnny Depp did what he did best and played a creepy yet fantastic villainous character, and you could see from his view how he won people over. As for the rest of the characters, the overall performances were good, but they were lacking in other regards--which I’ll get onto later. 

The cinematography was great as usual, David Yates did a pretty good job with the movie. Some reviewers have been complaining about the cinematography and the editing being too jarring, but I personally didn’t mind it that much. I’m not that big into filmatography in the sense that it will usually not make or break a movie for me in general. That being said, it was well enough to do it, and the CGI, of course, was great, but it felt a bit heavy handed and reliant in the movie. Overall though the directing was pretty much the best considering the circumstances.

The Bad

Oh boy, where do I begin? I think the most obvious and the weakest part of the movie and why people hate it the most is to have to do ironically with the creator herself, and the person who probably thought of this whole world. Now, there’s been a lot of JK Rowling hate on her, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it--but focusing on this movie alone I’ll focus on some key points that could have made the film better in my opinion: 

1) a lot more cutting down, specifically in exposition 

Now JK Rowling is a great writer when it comes to building characters and interesting plots and all that, but writing a novel and writing a screenplay for a film doesn’t always translate equally. What does this mean? I novels you can get away with a lot more exposition, and you can get away with a lot more in just writing, but in film, you have to show more than tell. This is a large weakness as a lot of the character’s dialogue doesn’t even tell anything about the character but just more plot stuff that may not even be that necessary.

2) The characters and plots 

The characters are kind of weak in this. Besides Newt and Jacob in the first film, there isn’t much going for me in characters. This isn’t really the fault of the actors as much as the fault of the writing which doesn’t give much wiggle room for the characters at all. Think of Tina, how would you describe Tina? She’s kind, sure, no-nonsense and in your face with a sense of right and wrong. This isn’t bad but it’s bland. Now compare that to Hermione and how you would compare her or even Luna. My point is that she’s not great at fleshing out characters with dialogue and there’s a reason she didn’t screenwrite the Harry Potter films but wrote the novels. 

The characters also even when having character points seems caricature-like and contradict themselves. The most blatantly bad one was Queenie. Queenie was a sweetheart, I thought she was adorable and cute in the first film, maybe more potential for her to grow as a character in the 2nd. This didn’t happen though, for one she