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kelly_chamblissToday I went to see Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Overall, I found it a disappointment on many levels: filmmaking, story-telling, characterization, acting, world-building.
I didn't hate it. There are fun and atmospheric moments, imaginative sets and art direction, intriguing nods to the books, some interesting ambiguities that could potentially make for thoughtful twists and complexities in future installments.
But on the whole, it was hard to care about any of the characters. They're mere outlines of people, not even consistent with the outlines they were in the first film. (For instance, why is Tina opposed to Queenie dating a Muggle? How does that seeming prejudice square with Tina the apparent heroine of Film 1?) Almost all of the characters, even Newt, are marginalized by the overstuffed plot. They're just pegs to hang events on, not fully-realized beings. Nor do they have much to do, all things considered. With a couple of exceptions, none of their actions really influences the plot; for the most part, they're just tagging along watching stuff happen.
To my mind, the acting wasn't stellar, either. Eddie Redmayne's shy head-tipping schtick is more mannerism than acting. Johnny Depp doesn't ham things up, luckily, but neither is he particularly memorable; what impression he creates is more the result of his Billy Idol hair and his weird contact lens than anything that seems to come from within. Ezra Miller's performance is pretty blank and one-note (though the script is partially at fault, too; in terms of the character of Credence, there's not much there there).
The story is bloated, convoluted, told rather than shown (despite dramatized flashbacks), long on exposition, oddly unsuspenseful. Some of this problem comes from the film's position as part of the middle of a longer arc, meaning that lack of narrative shape is probably inevitable. But still, I think more could have been done to sharpen the mystery and suspense, develop the characters, make the action sequences meaningful, make the plot matter more. The major plot twist, when it comes, felt like an anti-climax to me.
In the end, we have just another story about powerful men fighting for power; women are sidekicks and sacrifices. I'm not even going to get into the problematic gendered and racial implications of Nagini, but that's another flaw.
Things I Liked:
--Newt's magical Sherlock Holmes routine, as he and a niffler track down Tina
--Jacob and Queenie: they showed virtually all the personality there was to see, even though, like most of the characters, they didn't have a lot to do. (But Queenie's behavior. . .huh? I'm guessing Imperius.)
--Jude Law as Dumbledore. . .though I'm not the only one to wonder why he wears sedate three-piece Muggle suits even when teaching at Hogwarts.
--the presence of Nicholas Flamel, a nice piece of continuity
--the portkey guy
--various Magical Moments and Artifacts, like the entrance to wizarding Paris, the window-washing house elf (which I chose to read ironically), the archive room in the French Ministry of Magic, Dumbledore's creation of a London fog, Newt's fabulous basement lab (with the fun joke of the ordinary-looking cellar stairs that lead to it).
--the ominous topicality of Grindelwald's final big speech: here was an alienation technique that felt deliberate to me, not an accident of sloppy script-writing or the demands of a commercial franchise. I was yanked out of the movie and plopped right back into 2018, where you can hear versions of Grindelwald's speech coming from the mouths of politicians and nationalists in any number of countries, from the US to Europe to the UK to China to South America.
Things That Left Me Scratching My Head and/or Cursing in Pissed-Off-Ness
--The fact that adult Leta Lestrange (Zoe Kravitz) is a very light-skinned black woman, but the actor who plays teenaged Leta is dark-skinned. This feels like white obliviousness in casting to me: a black person is a black person is a black person; they all look alike, right? This point particularly rankles because they obviously went to some trouble to get a teen-aged Newt who looks the part.
--And WTF is McGonagall doing here??????????? At the time GoF was published, JKR said McG was a "sprightly seventy." Since GoF's internal calendar places its events in 1995, McG must have been born in 1925. A few years later, in Pottermore, JKR gave McG's birth year as 1935. Okay. . .it's possible to write off this discrepancy yet another example of Rowling's well-known innumeracy -- annoying, but not a canon-destroyer.
But to have McGonagall present at Hogwarts as a professor c. 1910 (the approximate date of the Newt flashback)??? A professor at Hogwarts a quarter century before she was even born?** Come on. . .a change of this magnitude is an insult, not only to fans but to even casual readers.
This example is what I had in mind when I said the film was a disappointment in terms of world-building. Part of what makes the Harry Potter saga so compelling is that Rowling created such a fully-realized world that it seemed real. To play this fast-and-loose with her narrative is more than just an unwitting math error: it's thumbing her nose at her own achievement in world-building, a dismissal of the integrity of her own art. She is saying flat out: "I'm not even maintaining the illusion of a consistent piece of art. It's all just capitalist pandering; I'll write whatever might help put bodies in seats and coins in the till."
It's like that famous scene in The Wizard of Oz, when the machinations of "the man behind the curtain" are laid bare. But at least in The Wizard of Oz film, one could argue that the "man behind the curtain" represents the triumph of reality, a healthy unmasking of dangerous illusion. In JKR's case, though, that message doesn't seem possible. Instead, when she treats her own work this cavalierly, we're basically reminded that nothing can be taken seriously; it's all bullshit, fake news, changed for whatever is commercially expedient at the moment.
Oh, sure, one could make a high-falutin' case about how meta it all is, how post-modern, how deconstructive, how much a commentary on the indeterminate nature of artistic creation and performance. To that I say, to borrow one of Harry's passwords, "balderdash."
(**I've read some on-line speculations that the "Professor McGonagall" of the film is not the book McG -- she's an earlier relative, perhaps. But the credits specify "Minerva McGonagall," and in canon [to the extent that canon matters, which is apparently not much], McGonagall's father is a Muggle, so any magical ancestors would have a different name.)
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MAJOR SPOILER -- I hope that a lot of what seem to be serious plot holes will be filled in by later story developments. Chief among these is the notion that Credence is identified as Dumbledore's brother. Given that the character of Credence is supposed to have been born somewhere between 1905 to 1910, while Albus's parents were both dead by 1899, this timeline is problematic, to say the least. I'm hoping that there will be some interestingly-complicated -- but plausible -- explanation for this discrepancy. If it just turns out to be another of JKR's blithe dismissals of her own canon, I'll be pissed.
Of course, it's certainly possible that a lot of the holes and inconsistencies aren't really. . .they may be just deliberately-dangling threads that will be picked up in future films and woven into the whole story. If so, I'll come back and amend this post with an apology.
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None of this whinging means, of course, that I'll skip future "Fantastic Beasts" installments. I won't. I'm in the Potterverse for better or worse.
I didn't hate it. There are fun and atmospheric moments, imaginative sets and art direction, intriguing nods to the books, some interesting ambiguities that could potentially make for thoughtful twists and complexities in future installments.
But on the whole, it was hard to care about any of the characters. They're mere outlines of people, not even consistent with the outlines they were in the first film. (For instance, why is Tina opposed to Queenie dating a Muggle? How does that seeming prejudice square with Tina the apparent heroine of Film 1?) Almost all of the characters, even Newt, are marginalized by the overstuffed plot. They're just pegs to hang events on, not fully-realized beings. Nor do they have much to do, all things considered. With a couple of exceptions, none of their actions really influences the plot; for the most part, they're just tagging along watching stuff happen.
To my mind, the acting wasn't stellar, either. Eddie Redmayne's shy head-tipping schtick is more mannerism than acting. Johnny Depp doesn't ham things up, luckily, but neither is he particularly memorable; what impression he creates is more the result of his Billy Idol hair and his weird contact lens than anything that seems to come from within. Ezra Miller's performance is pretty blank and one-note (though the script is partially at fault, too; in terms of the character of Credence, there's not much there there).
The story is bloated, convoluted, told rather than shown (despite dramatized flashbacks), long on exposition, oddly unsuspenseful. Some of this problem comes from the film's position as part of the middle of a longer arc, meaning that lack of narrative shape is probably inevitable. But still, I think more could have been done to sharpen the mystery and suspense, develop the characters, make the action sequences meaningful, make the plot matter more. The major plot twist, when it comes, felt like an anti-climax to me.
In the end, we have just another story about powerful men fighting for power; women are sidekicks and sacrifices. I'm not even going to get into the problematic gendered and racial implications of Nagini, but that's another flaw.
Things I Liked:
--Newt's magical Sherlock Holmes routine, as he and a niffler track down Tina
--Jacob and Queenie: they showed virtually all the personality there was to see, even though, like most of the characters, they didn't have a lot to do. (But Queenie's behavior. . .huh? I'm guessing Imperius.)
--Jude Law as Dumbledore. . .though I'm not the only one to wonder why he wears sedate three-piece Muggle suits even when teaching at Hogwarts.
--the presence of Nicholas Flamel, a nice piece of continuity
--the portkey guy
--various Magical Moments and Artifacts, like the entrance to wizarding Paris, the window-washing house elf (which I chose to read ironically), the archive room in the French Ministry of Magic, Dumbledore's creation of a London fog, Newt's fabulous basement lab (with the fun joke of the ordinary-looking cellar stairs that lead to it).
--the ominous topicality of Grindelwald's final big speech: here was an alienation technique that felt deliberate to me, not an accident of sloppy script-writing or the demands of a commercial franchise. I was yanked out of the movie and plopped right back into 2018, where you can hear versions of Grindelwald's speech coming from the mouths of politicians and nationalists in any number of countries, from the US to Europe to the UK to China to South America.
Things That Left Me Scratching My Head and/or Cursing in Pissed-Off-Ness
--The fact that adult Leta Lestrange (Zoe Kravitz) is a very light-skinned black woman, but the actor who plays teenaged Leta is dark-skinned. This feels like white obliviousness in casting to me: a black person is a black person is a black person; they all look alike, right? This point particularly rankles because they obviously went to some trouble to get a teen-aged Newt who looks the part.
--And WTF is McGonagall doing here??????????? At the time GoF was published, JKR said McG was a "sprightly seventy." Since GoF's internal calendar places its events in 1995, McG must have been born in 1925. A few years later, in Pottermore, JKR gave McG's birth year as 1935. Okay. . .it's possible to write off this discrepancy yet another example of Rowling's well-known innumeracy -- annoying, but not a canon-destroyer.
But to have McGonagall present at Hogwarts as a professor c. 1910 (the approximate date of the Newt flashback)??? A professor at Hogwarts a quarter century before she was even born?** Come on. . .a change of this magnitude is an insult, not only to fans but to even casual readers.
This example is what I had in mind when I said the film was a disappointment in terms of world-building. Part of what makes the Harry Potter saga so compelling is that Rowling created such a fully-realized world that it seemed real. To play this fast-and-loose with her narrative is more than just an unwitting math error: it's thumbing her nose at her own achievement in world-building, a dismissal of the integrity of her own art. She is saying flat out: "I'm not even maintaining the illusion of a consistent piece of art. It's all just capitalist pandering; I'll write whatever might help put bodies in seats and coins in the till."
It's like that famous scene in The Wizard of Oz, when the machinations of "the man behind the curtain" are laid bare. But at least in The Wizard of Oz film, one could argue that the "man behind the curtain" represents the triumph of reality, a healthy unmasking of dangerous illusion. In JKR's case, though, that message doesn't seem possible. Instead, when she treats her own work this cavalierly, we're basically reminded that nothing can be taken seriously; it's all bullshit, fake news, changed for whatever is commercially expedient at the moment.
Oh, sure, one could make a high-falutin' case about how meta it all is, how post-modern, how deconstructive, how much a commentary on the indeterminate nature of artistic creation and performance. To that I say, to borrow one of Harry's passwords, "balderdash."
(**I've read some on-line speculations that the "Professor McGonagall" of the film is not the book McG -- she's an earlier relative, perhaps. But the credits specify "Minerva McGonagall," and in canon [to the extent that canon matters, which is apparently not much], McGonagall's father is a Muggle, so any magical ancestors would have a different name.)
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E
MAJOR SPOILER -- I hope that a lot of what seem to be serious plot holes will be filled in by later story developments. Chief among these is the notion that Credence is identified as Dumbledore's brother. Given that the character of Credence is supposed to have been born somewhere between 1905 to 1910, while Albus's parents were both dead by 1899, this timeline is problematic, to say the least. I'm hoping that there will be some interestingly-complicated -- but plausible -- explanation for this discrepancy. If it just turns out to be another of JKR's blithe dismissals of her own canon, I'll be pissed.
Of course, it's certainly possible that a lot of the holes and inconsistencies aren't really. . .they may be just deliberately-dangling threads that will be picked up in future films and woven into the whole story. If so, I'll come back and amend this post with an apology.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E
None of this whinging means, of course, that I'll skip future "Fantastic Beasts" installments. I won't. I'm in the Potterverse for better or worse.