Review of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) by Calderra — 17 Jun 2019

Crimes of Grindlewald is an objectively bad film, and I know how much people hate when you claim a movie is objectively bad. This one is.

Fact - The film has many abrupt jumps where characters will be in one place, and suddenly deep into the story in another, so clearly there was a longer edit of the film and a massive chunk was badly edited out. Non-spoiler: Characters are being chased in a library in a big action scene, hard cut, the same characters are all deep into a giant exposition dump inside a crypt. How did they get here? What's with the change in tone? The directly clearly hopes you'll shut up and eat your popcorn.

Fact - This film contradicts its own canon. A character in the first film literally explodes and is absolutely certainly dead, and the start of this film handwaves that character as still being alive. If death doesn't matter anymore in this movie, I don't care about any of the conflict. A character just caught fire and fell to dust? For all I know they're coming back in the next movie. Who cares?

Fact - The plot has some the biggest leaps in logic of any Harry Potter movie, bordering on incoherent script writing. In one scene it's explained that an important character actually died a long time ago - but wait - that character was accidentally mistaken for an even more important character. They have to leap through a bunch of hoops as to how this character's whole backstory was an insane, crazy coincidence - in order to introduce an even bigger coincidence on top of that! The big reveal is convoluted at best, and when it's explained poorly as it is here, it's just bad.

Fact - JK Rowling is going insane. Dumbledore is gay for no reason. I say "for no reason" here because the film is constantly telling you that characters are in love, and that being in love is their motivation for doing something. That's not interesting storytelling, that's just bad writing. Why is Dumbledore not fighting the bad guy? He's gay for him. Why is the hero going after a girl? He wants to bone her. Why is the fat guy chasing the blonde lady? He wants to bone her. Why is the asian lady hanging out with the freak? They seem to be sexually attracted. It's basically safe to assume the only reason anyone gets off their ass in this universe is that they're horny. It's dumb.

Fact - No seriously JK Rowling is insane. The whole plot hinges on Grindlewald telling wizards that they're being persecuted by the Ministry of Magic, not being allowed to marry muggles and so forth. Except he also wants only pureblood wizards to rule the world. So muggles have to be removed from power, but it's also cool if you marry them? That seems weird, but fine. So Gindlewald's whole argument rests on wizards being afraid of the terrible "aurors" - basically cops who kill bad wizards. He specifically says it's important wizards understand he's not the violent one. So how does he show he's non-violent? In literally the scene after that argument, he tries to destroy the world. What in the everliving hell is this terrible writing!? How would his followers not be mad that he's trying to murder tons of people - including wizards - when that is literally exactly the sort of behavior he's using to turn them to his side!? It's like listening to an actual insane person trying to explain political conspiracies to you.