The reason to be apprehensive about sequels, spinoffs, and
reboots pierces deeper than simply “is it going to be good, is it going to
honor the original?” Spinoffs, whether they’re prequels, sequels, or something
else entirely, are often nothing more than a carrot on the end of a short stick
for lazy writers. The best spinoffs harmonize with their original counterpart;
the worst desperately try to sing off key as loudly as possible.
Fantastic Beasts: The
Crimes of Grindelwald is a disorienting cacophony of destructive
interference. At times it tries to hit the same wavelength as the original Harry Potter stories, but it’s so
mismatched in tone and execution that it can barely convey what it’s even
supposed to be about. On that note, it’s so absent of self-awareness that it’s
not entirely clear that it even knows what it’s supposed to be about. While the
first Fantastic Beasts film was
debatably unnecessary, it was mostly harmless and original enough to stay
interesting after eight movies of one of the most wildly entertaining fantasy
stories in the last century. Crimes of Grindelwald,
on the other hand, is a movie bulldozing through the chaos of an incoherent
plot. It doesn’t even seem as if J.K. Rowling handed Warner Brothers a first
draft, but rather a disorganized notebook of furiously brainstormed ideas. Writing
for BuzzFeed, Alanna Bennett describes the experience of watching Crimes of Grindelwald best by likening
it to the awkward, embarrassed feeling of accidentally
locking eyes with a pooping dog.
The true crime of Grindelwald
is Rowling’s apparent insistence on writing one of the worst Harry Potter fanfics
out there. Rowling, one of the most famously deliberate authors alive when it
comes to details and consistency, has clearly stopped giving a single shit
about her stories making any sense. It’s not worth it to list all the plot
holes, non-sequiturs, fan-service-y character inclusions, and insultingly dumb
subplots simply because I don’t have the time to write that review.
But will the real J.K. Rowling please stand up?
I call Crimes of
Grindelwald bad fan-fiction because it treats itself with the same brazen
disregard for, well, the basic principles of story writing that plenty of
middle schoolers eschew when carelessly spilling their wildest fantasies about
their favorite characters all over Tumblr. Crimes
of Grindelwald doesn’t even try to cover up its problems with bullshit
(which should be pretty goddamn easy
when your protagonist’s whole motivation is finding as many magical animals as
possible). Much worse, Rowling seems to think using all that bullshit somehow adds to the story.
Crimes of Grindelwald
starts with the bullshit early. Credence (Ezra Miller), who was very publicly
and dramatically zapped to a billion flakes at the end of the last film, is
confoundingly working in one piece as a cleaning boy for a magical touring
freak show in France (as one does, I guess). Despite the entire first film
establishing him as one of the most powerful sexually magically
repressed wizards on earth, he recruits the help of Nagini (Claudia Kim), a
hyper-Orientalized Indonesian woman who is cursed to eventually turn into Voldemort’s
right-hand snake, in order to escape. Aside from her shapeshifting curse,
Nagini’s remarkable traits include liking Credence, saying very little, and
being one of the few persons of color killed off in this movie. Gellert Grindelwald,
played by Johnny Depp with a Hitler Youth haircut and looking (as my good
friend KD said) like an extra from Django
Unchained, is on the hunt for Credence for a completely unexplained reason
that we must assume has something to do with Grindelwald’s raison d'être:
molding a world in which the superior wizard race rules above the ignorant
muggles.
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| "HA HA HA BETCHA NEVER HEARD THAT BEFORE, FUCKERS!" |
This whole re-hashed theme culminates in an absolutely
fucking insane scene in which Grindelwald, preaching at a rally of his
followers, takes a hit of his prophetic skull bong and blows its smoke in the
air to reveal that wizards must intervene to stop, among other World War
Two tragedies, the Holocaust through… *checks notes* …their racial superiority.
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| Coming soon to a Spencer's near you |
Let’s throw on the brakes right there. J.K. Rowling
literally spent a second of her life having the thought “the wizards in my
made-up world could have stopped the Holocaust and my audience needs to know.” What the actual fuck? Two or three
generations of people the world over fell in love with a story about a wizard
school so that 21 years later she could posit that her made up parallel world
of wizards and witches could have stopped the very real murder of millions of
Jews. Why on earth J.K. Rowling decided this would be okay is beyond me,
particularly when public sympathy toward ethno-nationalist sentiments is at its
highest in Europe and the United States since the end of the Second World War.
“Problematic” is an entirely overused and inadequate adjective to apply here
but Rowling’s implication has left me grasping for other words.
It’s also one of the most asinine crutches a writer can use:
wouldn’t it be so clever if I shoehorned
entirely unrelated historical events into my story? This is up there with
Liberally Dumping Thesaurus Entries on Your Manuscript on the list of hallmarks
of an unimaginative writer. It does not make the story any smarter and, in this
case, it’s completely unnecessary when the time period of the story has been
thoroughly established and the moral struggle of this spinoff is a redundant
retelling of the fundamental conflict of the original Harry Potter story. But Crimes of Grindelwald just can’t stop
with the Holocaust: Rowling also embellishes an already bloated ad-hoc
cradle-swap subplot by setting it on a sinking ocean liner, almost surely the
Titanic.
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| "Gosh, Jack, if only there was a witch nearby to cast an engorgio spell on this door!" |
It's also worth considering the casting for this film. Jude
Law, playing a young Albus Dumbledore, is a highlight of this movie. His
performance, invoking Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore without mimicking it, elevates
the film a couple inches higher than it deserves. Nearly every other major
casting decision misses its mark, though. I won’t delve into the Johnny Depp casting controversy because the public outcry against the decision to keep him
has said all I would say anyway. Why Rowling feels the need to keeping stepping on
rakes in Depp’s defense is beyond me. She hardly wrote Grindelwald with enough
unique style and personality as a villain to justify specifically needing Depp
for the role. In another entirely avoidable casting mistake, there is simply no
good reason why Nagini, played by South Korean actress Claudia Kim, needs to be
specifically identified as an Indonesian woman. How did this disconnect even
make it past the table read? Nagini is a fictional character that literally
nobody but Rowling knew used to be a human being before this movie was released. Rowling
could have just made Nagini a South
Korean character and nobody would’ve been the wiser. Or better yet, don’t
mention where Nagini is from because it makes no difference! And on the note of
making no difference, Newt Scamander is a waste of Eddie Redmayne. His shy,
quirky character worked just well enough in the first Fantastic Beasts film to be engaging and endearing as the story’s
moral rudder, but those same traits lock him out of character development in
this film while more dynamic players take center stage. Early in the film, Dumbledore
tells Scamander that he admires him because he doesn’t seek power and only wants
to do what’s right. Sound familiar? Rowling has written that character before
and knows how to make a compelling protagonist out of it, but she isn’t doing
it with Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts
series
Crimes of Grindelwald
isn’t terrible because of its jersey-knit plot or its uninspired reuse of the
original wizards-as-greater-than-muggles ideological conflict. It’s a mess
because Rowling has given up writing and focused on explaining. Rowling is not a terrible writer: seven Harry Potter books stand as a testament
to that, despite whatever relatively minor flaws they have. However, I can’t
think of any good reason why we have Crimes
of Grindelwald. It exhibits none of the key characteristics of Rowling’s
original books: their exacting attention to detail and consistency, their
discipline for staying out of the trap of explaining past and current events,
and their thematic quality. Rowling, who famously spent years privately
building her unique world of wizards and witches in near-Tolkien levels of
detail, has stooped to the level of cheap historical revisionism. The magic
which gave hundreds of millions of children a role model for parsing right and
wrong, for dealing with grief and bullying, which convinced them they’d too one
day get a letter by owl, is left behind. Newt Scamander spends weeks refusing
to take sides when Harry Potter stood and fought. Crimes of Grindelwald is everything the Harry Potter stories deliberately refused to be. J.K. Rowling has
nothing left to say.
