Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) is another Harry Potter universe prequel movie, but much like its predecessor, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), it suffers from a dearth of sympathetic characters (contrast with the original Harry Potter stories, featuring Potter, a boy suffering from hatred brought on by ignorance, and his courageous climb from his under-the-stairs bedroom to a leading position as a student at a school for wizardlings), instead substituting wizards who are inscrutable, or are even indulging in acts of barbarity, such as the removal of the tongue of a prisoner.
And the one who essentially takes responsibility for the removal is allegedly on the side of the good guys.
And the sad part, in terms of story development, is not that such barbarity, even if it’s reversible, has taken place, but that the story-tellers didn’t realize that this was a pivotal moral moment for the story. Think about it: does any modern Western society condone glossectomy as a punishment? Even to stop a silver-tongued devil, as the victim, Grindelwald, of this procedure is supposed to be?
Thus an opportunity arises to argue an important moral point concerning whether & when exceptions can be made to strong moral precepts, and that could have opened up the story immensely. Or perhaps some karmic recoil could have been rained down explicitly on she who authorized the procedure. Such action – reactions are the meat of a good story, and this opportunity was discarded like a dirty diaper.
Another problem is that the magic is basically free of boundaries. A wave of a wand, a couple of words, and something happens. Cool stuff, no? No. It’s too easy to pull a lion out of a hat every time a character runs into a roadblock, and that de-emphasizes the cleverness, wisdom, or (better yet) the sad tradeoffs the characters could have displayed and paid for.
In the original series (at least the movies, I never read the books), they get away with not discussing the rules of wizarding much because the characters were so compelling. They, in fact, moved the plot along, not the magic. But in this movie, the magic is too instrumental, so it should have been structured so that the characters had to do clever things to achieve their goals – which they occasionally do.
But, returning to the characters, there was little sympathy for them. Even the lead, autistic-like Newt Scamander, struggled to hold my interest, despite the adorable Chinese water dragon he eventually captures. I enjoyed the young Albus Dumbledore, and Johnny Depp, playing the evil Grindelwald, I think did a fine job conveying an entity convinced of its own rightness, and that did add to the story, not subtract. But after that the pickings are slim. It’s not the acting, which is fine except for the accents, which I often found impenetrable, but the characters’ words. Or perhaps the actors did fail to convey the essential humanity of their characters – but I am inclined to blame the storytellers, for it didn’t seem as if the characters really cared. An entire crop of good guys get wiped out, and yet I saw nary a tear wiped from a cheek over them. Glossectomy without controversy.
In the end, there’s too much convenient magic, and not enough struggle against overwhelming odds.
