Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, a visually stunning movie that leaves audiences with mixed emotions
Looks good, feels dumb
The third Chapter of the Fantastic Beasts series tries to rise from the ashes of The Crimes of Grindelwald with very little detail to grow on the audience and acting like a ship that’s drifting away from its main course.
Following the ending of The Crimes of Grindelwald, Albus realizes that Grindelwald is moving for the domination of the wizard world and the cleansing of the muggles (the ordinary human) through the act of war. Dumbledore cannot, however, take on Grindelwald directly because of a blood pact between them and Grindelwald’s newfound ability to see the future, so Dumbledore sends Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), his brother Theseus (Callum Turner), American witch “Lally” (Jessica Williams), Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam), and Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler).
Politics, love and less fantastic beasts…? The rest of the movie becomes subplots, so many that it becomes difficult to follow the story as a whole. One would be forgiven if they found themselves wondering “What is happening?”, in the middle of watching the movie. The movie finds Jude Law’s Albus Dumbledore and Mads Mikkelsen’s Gellert Grindelwald in a very confusing relationship that overshadows Newt, the supposed protagonist and the titular fantastic beasts of the wizarding world. The overly political threequel to the fantastic beasts’ franchise focuses on surprising revelations that are everything but shocking, abandoning any points of interest from the preceding two chapters.
The movie tends to drift away from the main sub title’s theme which is all about “Secrets” and then tends to focus on the political matters of the wizarding world. The movie spends most of its time focusing on Grindelwald’s schemes and manipulations, which involve political assassination attempts so as to make himself the legitimate candidate for the position of which he would become the President of the wizarding World, a massively spanning political system that you’d think would be significant to the first Harry Potter series, but evidently not due to reasons unknown. Sadly, Fantastic Beasts: The secrets of Dumbledore shies away from franchise’s usual dose of magic that drew audiences into the wizarding world despite the many wizards and witches encountered.
The storyline of the movie, The Secrets of Dumbledore, is full of confusion, almost none of the film’s various characters have a meaningful character arc of their own. They’ve entirely abandoned what they’d created in the prior films. Let’s start with Newt Scamander, who is supposed to be the hero of the Fantastic Beasts franchise; you’ll be astonished to see that his screen time has been drastically decreased, and his impact on the tale has been restricted largely to the rescue of a single, solitary animal. You might be startled to learn that Jacob’s (Dan Fogler) romance with Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol) receives far more screen time than our protagonist’s. Newt appears in the story, but his importance is understated because he has less to do with the events than ever before. He isn’t even the one who moves the plot ahead. Jude Law’s, Albus Dumbledore character has taken up this role.
Secondly, looking at Ezra Miller’s part as Credence Barebone, who now goes by the name Aurelius Dumbledore, they appear to have lost all interest in his story arc, which they had built up to the end of ‘The Crimes of Grindelwald,’ when they last depicted him as a rising powerful wizard. They now appear grimly determined to get to the end, without looking more into his story. Another plot point that seems to have flown over the heads of the makers of this film is Grindelwald’s plan to start a wizard uprising to prevent the forthcoming horrors of World War II. This was mentioned not one time.
The only time the movie focuses on the titular fantastic beasts is in the role of the very rare Qilin, an animal found in Kweilin China. Qilins were deer-like creatures with precognitive abilities as well as the power to see into a person’s soul to find out if they were pure of heart. However, the qilins, though magnificent creatures, are nothing but a political tool for both Grindelwald and Dumbledore to further their motivations; ensuring Grindelwald does not win the election for Dumbledore versus securing the election for himself for Grindelwald.
However, the movie was not entirely a bore, the highlight of the movie was the dynamic between Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen who lend a tense background to the wizards’ connection. The visual effects were impressive and were a perfect accomplice to the colorful fight scenes. There was also a delightful performance from the Jessica Williams who stole the show with her portrayal American Witch Eulalie Hicks with such grace.
The film is an improvement over the previous sequel, featuring strong performances from new cast members and high-quality visual effects that substantially help the franchise but, obviously has a lot to work on the buildup of the story.
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