Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) movie review: This is the third strike for this uninspired, confused brand attempting to milk the charm of the Harry Potter books while contributing nothing to it. While I wouldn’t call it simple, the job of a movie critic is straightforward. We’re meant to give each release our full attention and focus, to be honest about our reactions to it, and to try to have a meaningful dialogue about it. It is also our responsibility to give every film a chance. Every week, you must sit in that dark cinema and truly think that any film has the potential to alter your life.
However, certain films make it difficult. Some franchises, like as the Fantastic Beasts films, find it difficult to maintain that cautious optimism. There’s already so much going against the stale, needless, stretched-to-its-limits series that it’s tough not to feel cynical before even a single frame is seen.
While I admit that I only have positive recollections of the first film, which enabled us to rediscover the Wizarding World that many of us cherish and introduced us to a new cast of truly charming characters. These ‘first movies,’ like the Hobbit films, have an honesty and purity about them. They appear to originate from a place of love for the planet they seek to rediscover. But it’s an honesty that fades and fades in their sequels, as a single film’s plot and characters are stretched beyond their boundaries, forced into trilogies they don’t need or deserve.
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Meandering Storytelling and Spectacular Miscasting Grindelwald was a dreadful fever dream of a film in this scenario. All I could remember about it before embarking on this third (and hopefully last) instalment was that there was something about a strained brother-sister relationship that I couldn’t follow or feel for the life of me. In fact, the brand was so desperate that they developed a Dumbledore. The big reveal in the second film was that Ezra Miller’s Credence was a hidden Dumbledore that no one knew about (who somehow ended up in Queens New York…)
Credence, like most of the characters in this movie, had great effect and weight in the first film (the concept of an Obscurus and the perils of repressing one’s identity remains a brilliant metaphor). But there was no need for him to be force-fitted and recycled into the subsequent editions.
Twenty years ago, the seeds of one of the most enthralling good against evil storylines ever told on film were sown. The Harry Potter series accomplished a lot more than just make people cry. It inspired us to believe in magic. The Fantastic Beasts franchise appears to have depleted the magic.
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