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Spoilers for Fantastic Beasts 2 are discussed below. Continue reading at your own peril!

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the tenth movie within the Harry Potter universe, and it should have opened up a whole new world of exploration for its franchise. Instead of building off of what worked in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, though (which was, primarily, Newt and his beasts), it pivoted into a much larger and more cosmic battle between two wizarding greats, Dumbledore and Grindelwald. And yet, we won’t see that battle for likely quite some time (probably around the fifth and final planned movie of the Fantastic Beasts franchise). For now, we get setup. And unlike the Harry Potter books and movies, which each had their own climax that built, slowly, towards the battle between Harry and Voldemort, The Crimes of Grindelwald was largely an exposition-heavy chapter of the Fantastic Beasts story that felt almost totally disconnected from the franchise’s other takes in terms of tone, characters, and indeed magic.

There are plenty of things to single out as disappointments or outright mistakes in The Crimes of Grindelwald, although there are a few things that did work. Eddie Redmayne slightly recalibrated his take on Newt to make him even more inward-facing and shy, and yet, able to exude exceptional warmth towards the creatures he saves and adores. Some of the beasts were exceptionally fun, particularly the baby nifflers and the joke of a giant cat-dragon being bewitched by a tinkling toy. But that sense of whimsy and exploration of this wonderful, magical world was limited to only the movie’s smallest moments, leaving the rest feeling rather cold.

Below, I’ve detailed some of the biggest crimes of Fantastic Beasts 2, and why it didn’t work as well as it by all rights could have and should have:

Too Ambitious for Its Runtime

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Image via Warner Bros.

Somewhere, there is a 6-hour director’s cut of this movie that makes sense. Maybe. But the choppy narrative flow and lack of a clear three-act structure that we have before us now proves how much editing played a role in creating this film. Entire storylines seemed lost in the editing room — there were too many plots, too many new characters, and it was all too steeped in lore for casual moviegoers. This movie isn’t for casual moviegoers, I get that. But it still needs to work, even for fans, as its own story that’s part of a larger whole.

Fantastic Beasts 2 feels very novelistic, and you can see how much deeper we could have gotten into these characters and their backstories, lives, and motivations with the space and breadth a novel affords. It’s a problem many of the later Harry Potter films had; the books were so large and so dense that it was hard to translate the story onto the screen and not lose so much that it became nonsensical. At least in those cases, fans had the books to fill in the gaps. With The Crimes of Grindelwald, we’re diving in without a net.

This movie follows arguably eight protagonists’ stories. And unlike, say, an Avengers movie, none of these characters (save Dumbledore) had the benefit of previous films that told us their origins. We don’t know them that well, and that’s a problem.

A Lack of Familiar Magic

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Image via Warner Bros.

One of the most charming parts of exploring Harry Potter’s world at Hogwarts was following along with how magic influenced and defined these characters' lives. Magic was never a cure-all, and most wonderfully, the spell that Harry used the most (to great effect) was “Expelliarmus!” Newt does throw out a “Accio niffler” in this movie, but for the most part, those very basic spells are forgotten or unspoken to the point of not seeming to matter. Yes, these are adult wizards who are accomplished enough, one presumes, to be able to just say the spells in their head to make them work. But other than repairing household items they break (and interrupting the Muggle world without a thought to Obliviate), the wizards of The Crimes of Grindelwald seem to mostly use their wands as rocket launchers, pistols that shoot fire, and explosive devices. When did those spells become so common? (And what are they? Wouldn’t they have been handy for Harry to know?)

The most popular spell in Fantastic Beasts 2, though, might be Avada Kedavra. The characters love this one. We never hear it, but a zap of green light is a signal that the wizards involved are killing every man, woman, and child who gets in their way. It’s cold, but it also becomes a little meaningless. People are Avada Kedavra-ing all over the place, even Aurors! A little Expelliarmus would go a long way.

In focusing on these big pyrotechnic displays and easily-administered death spells, the movie gets rid of the warmth of a close-knit and knowable wizarding world—in favor of a confusing, chaotic and very loose confederation of people who occasional perform magic but mostly just operate on their own. This is a dangerous time and place, we understand that; but without feeling connected to the everyday magical elements of it, that’s all it’s allowed to be.

And don’t even get me started on Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) taking a massive bong hit off that skull to show everyone a sneak peek at World War II. What in Merlin’s name was that about? (And does it really even matter?)

Convoluted Exposition

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Image via Warner Bros.

The alternate title for this segment is “Everybody Gets a Half-Sibling!” In the second half of the movie, everything stops as we watch Leta Lestrange (Zoe Kravitz) pull out a locked family tree and explain who everyone is, as well as how she has both a black brother and a white brother. We didn’t really need this, especially regarding the rape that was so casually thrown in there as the reason Leta was conceived. But just as we think the truth of who Credence (Ezra Miller) is has finally been revealed, there’s a whole other side-story that Leta tells us about how she swapped her crying sibling with another baby (does she not know all babies cry?), and her brother drowned (in the Titanic, probably), while this other boy lived. Ok?! (Side-note: this movie kills a lot of babies).

That was presumably to set up Leta calling herself a monster later, and essentially letting Grindelwald annihilate her. But it would have been great to see her use enough magic before that as an adult to understand why she might think she could face Grindelwald at all, and not commit suicide-by-dark-wizard. Goodbye Leta, we hardly knew ye.

If it wasn’t clear before, that scene should prove how much the movie didn’t have time to organically explore its own world, and thus had to call a timeout in order to spell it all out and set up the final reveal: that Credence is actually a Dumbledore. He’s probably a Potter too, at this point. What does that actually mean? And why should we care? Tune in next week, I mean in the next two years to find out!

Missing Out on Great Character Stories

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Image via Warner Bros.

The joy of a good story is in connecting with its characters. The Crimes of Grindelwald has so many characters though that there is significant screen time spent on people whose names we don’t even know (like Grindelwald’s henchmen, especially his mysterious right-hand woman). This is especially true of a really fascinating character steeped in Potter lore like Nagini (Claudia Kim). There’s no time to look into who she now, though, or how she became part of the Circus Arcanum, or anything else really.

There are also several relationships that felt like they were left on the cutting room floor. Newt is gleeful when Tina (Katherine Waterston) throws Theseus (Callum Turner) against a wall, and says it’s the best moment of his life. Why? Yes, Newt loves or loved Leta (and she clearly loves him, which I’ll address in a minute), but all we’ve seen of Theseus is a concerned brother who tries to help Newt out, and can’t be faulted that Newt didn’t make a move on Leta earlier. Speaking of which, Leta doesn’t seem to care about Theseus at all, and we never see much of them interacting as a couple without her pining for Newt. She also doesn’t seem like a woman who would keep those feelings to herself, and would have just asked Newt out to begin with. So many questions!

Credence perhaps gets the shortest end of the stick in The Crimes of Grindelwald, which is particularly unfortunate given that he’s pretty much the key to everything (sorry Newt). More time spent with him in the Circus Arcanum (how he ended up there, what exactly he does, etc) would not have been misspent. Instead, we got some extremely extended and cringe-worthy scenes with Jacob (Dan Fogler) and Queenie (Alison Sudol), trying to establish why Queenie would suddenly become an ardent Grindel-Nazi by the end of the film (something that doesn’t seem to bother Tina that much, we should note).

Queenie’s heel turn, as it were, is an interesting reveal, but it’s not one that feels earned in any way. The same is true for any and all of Grindelwald’s supporters. We’re told that he’s very persuasive, but we don’t see much of it. In the Harry Potter stories, it’s clearly shown how the Death Eaters supported Voldemort’s vision of a world where wizards rule. Here, there’s no sense of a larger movement against muggles.

Only Newt managed to eke out some emotional resonance in his story, purely because of Eddie Redmayne’s performance and some assists from cute fantastic creatures. Otherwise, the emotions and character arcs of The Crimes of Grindelwald all fell flat.

Hollow Name Drops

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Image via Warner Bros.

Hi Nicolas Flamel! Glad you stopped in. And Professor McGonagall in the background. And McLaggen’s grandfather or something. It’s the Potterverse, we get it. But those connections never actually connected anything here, they were just names thrown out in passing to remind us that yes, despite all visual and spiritual evidence to the contrary, this movie is actually set in the same world as Harry Potter. But even when we spent more time with Potterverse characters like Nagini and Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), it didn’t reveal anything particularly deep about them, which feels like a major missed opportunity.

The most egregious example of this, though, is connecting Credence to every wizarding family in creation before settling on him being a Dumbledore. And the brother of Albus no less! It shrinks the overall world to have everyone be related to someone we already know. Does Credence have to be a Potter or a Lestrange or a Dumbledore? He’s interesting enough, or should be, without that. Lots of people have mysterious backstories in The Crimes of Grindelwald; It doesn’t matter, ultimately, who Credence’s parents were. What matters is who he is now, and how he chooses to use his abilities. Yes, his name means something to Grindelwald who is all about purity and lineage. But the movie reinforces this by putting Credence (rather improbably) in the middle of the lifelong battle between Dumbledore and Grindelwald and literally making him kin.

This, and the whole exposition about the Lestrange siblings, puts an emphasis on family trees and bloodlines that Harry Potter sought to destroy, in part by making Hermione (a witch not from a pureblood family) the greatest of her age, and in the way that it was Harry’s chosen family who helped him defeat the evil that killed his biological one. It’s not who you were born as, but who you choose to be. This franchise has, for itself, chosen to go the wrong way.

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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.