Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Much debate has been had over the casting of Jude Law as the young Albus Dumbledore. I would like to take the time now to make one thing perfectly clear: he is no Richard Harris but no one was ever going to be and I cannot think of anyone who would pull off playing a young Richard Harris.

This movie does not end. I know that Rowling has already stated her intention of their being several more movies in this franchise but I really feel that they shouldn't do that. This movie, whilst being good, did not exactly follow on with the Potter knowledge that die hard fans of the books already had. There is no other Dumbledore brother and it seems a little stupid with the way that the movie ended.

The first flaw is that the elite magicians in the world cannot see through something as simple as his method of escape. For me watching it was predictable. Predictability did not prevent me from enjoying the movie but did prevent me from watching it another time, which is something that the first movie did not do. The other underlying issue for me is the lack of verbal spells in this movie. There is this idea that once you become an adult you do not need to actually say spells but that takes away from the magic. Historically, people were always scared of words that they did not know and understand and that is what made us believe in magic. Once you remove the words from magic it stops being magic and just becomes visual effect. This movie has been fantastic for visual effects but the magical world mostly exists due to spells, spoken and shouted at each other and once you take that away the world seems less real and more like something we are watching on a screen, which loses half of the audience.

Johnny Depp, what can we say. This guy is one of the very few who can continually change his role when on screen. Recently we had this debate about Depp and decided that he so very rarely plays a 'normal' character that he has probably forgotten how to do it. Grindelwald is another character who cannot, in any way, be considered as 'normal'. He is weird, cruel and actually does very little in this movie. As always, there is supposed to be an epic battle between him and the Skamanders but some of that is lost in the lack of words used throughout the battle scenes, which is something similar that took place in the final movies of the 'Harry Potter' series and David Yates hasn't actually learned from it yet. Depp is a good acquisition to this cast and will play off nicely against Eddie Redmayne, who is perfect for the role of Newt Skamander and will
to be perfect.

They could end this series in two movies but knowing this franchise, they will just drag it out, like they did with Potter, until we are all bored and able to predict everything that is going to happen. The Potter movies got noticeably worse as they went on and I really don't want that to happen with this series as well. The first movie was fantastic and this movie wasn't as good but was still very good. The next movie will probably be slightly worse and then they will continue to downwards spiral until we are all endlessly bored.

For now, they remain a good franchise.