Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald premiered this weekend, and despite mixed reviews and very low hype surrounding the film, it was absolutely fantastic (pun not intended). The entire movie was visually stunning, and Johnny Depp’s Grindelwald was nothing short of pure evil. I would like to examine a few key points that I like and disliked about the film, and I hope that you agree with my assessment!
The Visuals
From the opening scene, one thing that caught my eye was just how good everything look. The CGI for this film is unlike any other Harry Potter movie, and the bright colors and fast paced action scenes really made for an optical masterpiece. I usually don’t put much stock in a movie’s visual effects, but watching Grindelwald’s escape scene truly took my breath away, and it set the theme for the rest of the film.
Johnny Depp
I do not particularly like Johnny Depp as an actor, and I like him even less as a person, but his performance as Grindelwald was absolutely brilliant. He made this character seem even more powerful, evil and cunning than Voldemort, and I loved every second of him on-screen. Aside from an effortless performance, Depp is one of only a few American actors I have ever heard do a decent British accent. It takes an actor of the highest caliber to play the most menacing villain in a cinematic universe while using an accent foreign to their own, and I gained some new respect for Depp’s acting method because of his excellence as Grindelwald.
Grindelvald?
One little detail that I disliked about Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is that no one knows how to pronounce the name in the title. Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is one of the first people we hear pronounce Grindelwald, and he pronounces it how it is spelled. However, Jude Law’s Dumbledore later pronounces it with a “V” sound in place of the “W”, and it immediately confuses everyone. This wouldn’t be as confusing if it was only Law (who admitted in an interview that he mistakenly changed the pronunciation), but for some reason that is how all of the other characters started saying it except for Newt. While Newt is a bit of an odd duck, I doubt that he would mispronounce the name of the wizard he helped take down in the first film, and I would have liked to have seen this continuity error get fixed before the movie came out.
Easter Eggs
Something I couldn’t get enough of were all the Easter eggs peppered into the film. It almost felt like an MCU movie, where you had to keep your eyes peeled for a reference from the previous movies at every second. Nicholas Flamel obviously played a huge part in the movie, and being able to see the Philosopher’s Stone, Hogwarts, The Mirror of Erised, and so many more Easter eggs really took me back to my childhood.
Conclusion
My only complaint about the second Fantastic Beasts is that it took a while to actually get to anything important. However, it felt a little bit like an episode of Game of Thrones. There was a lot of explanation of family lineage and dialogue that would mean something later in the movie, but it seemed a little tedious before I realized how useful all of this information will be.
I don’t think that anyone could have predicted how this movie ended, and I was left with an audible jaw-drop when it was revealed that Creedence was a Dumbledore. The plot was so intricate and thought out, and the love square between Newt, Lita, Theseus and Tina made it almost seem like a tragic love story in the end. I am extremely excited for the rest of the series, and I thought that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald was the best Harry Potter movie yet.
