Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Crimes of Grindlewald (2018)

As a series of seven kids books, the adventures of Harry Potter were quite entertaining, as long as you never ever tried to think about how the rest of the magical community functioned.

Displayed in the two “Fantastic Beasts” films (2016’s original, and this year’s sequel), it’s quite clear that JK Rowling never really thought about the rest of the world either, and now that her IP is extending far, far beyond the magical protective barriers of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, more questions are raised than are answered in any given scene.

This includes one of my favorite tropes of this series: every single “good guy” in the magical world is apparently compelled to make the worst decision possible at the worst time possible.

Eddy Redmayne returned to his role of the ever-awkward ‘Newt Scamander,’ met with returning character ‘Jacob’ (Dan Fogler), providing much-needed comic relief in a movie that took itself just a touch too seriously.

We also got to see Jude Law’s ‘Albus Dumbledore,’ who would decide if he was British or Scottish based on which sentence he was speaking
Odd, as Law is a native Brit.

While they never showed Dumbledore kissing Grindlewald, it was clear that WB wanted to make audiences very aware of the incredibly unnecessary twitter-post “rewrite” of Dumbledore’s sexual orientation.
Thank you, Rowling - your seven books and eight previous movies had plenty of time to include that detail if you’d ever cared to.

Speaking of 15 previous media giants: by the very nature of these movies being prequels, much of the “history” of the Harry Potter series is suffering the “Phantom Menace” treatment: names and places and things are getting dropped in, ostensibly for plot-specific needs, but also clearly to tickle the Potter Heads in the audience.

There are some unintended goofy moments too: At one point, someone steps out from behind a column in what is meant to be a very dramatic fashion. But it should only take you, the audience, a split second to realize that he must have been standing there, very quietly, for an unreasonable amount of time in order to make such an entrance, hoping that none of the other five people in the room moved from the exact positions they were in.

My final irk: it is very well established that teleporting via “apparition” is a common, né, mundane, form of travel for any magical person of age.
So why does anyone walk anywhere of distance? Why are there magical transportation options (for adults)? How does anyone get stuck in an uncomfortable position or location when they can literally magically teleport themselves to anywhere else they’d like to be?!

Seeing the Hogwarts Castle was fittingly dramatic, complete with a slightly re-arranged version of “Hedwig’s Theme” (the music you’ll immediately recognize as THE Harry Potter music), and the cinematic fly-over of the mountains, followed by a few scenes of the castle’s insides, were flawless.

In an attempt at turning the “Harry Potter” series into an extended universe, Warner Bros. coined the term “Wizarding World” for this new series of magic-focused films. If they do it right, WB will have a cinematic realm that could compete with Disney’s Marvel movie monstrosity, in an arena that Disney does not have footing in.

If they do it right.
They absolutely dropped the ball with their DC movies, so I’m not going to hold my breath.

I realize that much of the above sounds negative. A lot of that is me being a bad audience member.
I will say it felt like a more action packed film than the 2016 starter, but there was a little less fun this time around.
If nothing else, the ticket price was worth it to see a menagerie of imaginary monsters rendered so well animated that it was hard to remember they didn’t actually get filmed on set.