Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

By JD Phillips, geekr.org The Harry Potter movies are great but one of the main flaws of the original franchise was the struggle the films had condensing the lengthy novels into movies under three hours. Despite the Fantastic Beasts sequel not being based on a book, it still somehow feels like its stressing to condense a five hundred page book into a smaller narrative. The movie runs from scenario to scenario so quickly that it’s hard to remember what all happened in its muddled story. That’s not to say the film is terrible at all, surprisingly. For a movie that has serious pacing problems throughout and has more interest in setting up sequels than it is at finding a memorable plot of its own, it’s actually very entertaining. The returning cast members are all back and while none leave quite the impression they did before they’re all still entertaining in their own way. Newt is back but the movie doesn’t seem nearly as interested in him and his magical monsters than it is with all of the new elements. Redmayne is still terrific in the role, however, and makes the character much more interesting than the script does by itself. Jacob and Tina are back as well thou

The first Fantastic Beasts movie was excellent. It was a bright and magical adventure. This one is going down another path and I cannot say that I was overly thrilled by that. This movie is putting emphasis on political machinations, division between the wizards and the non-wizards, betrayals etc. etc. Take away the magic component and you really have a fairly regular racial-differences, humans are bad and all that, movie of the kind that Hollywood is all too eager to mass produce these days. Sure it is not as blunt, preachy and totally ridiculous as a lot of their creations but still … not the path I wanted these movies to take. At least there are plenty of magic and beasts around in this movie to make the dark and, at times, boring story a bit more compelling. The magic and the beasts, i.e. the special effects, are really the most enjoyable part of this movie. I was not too keen about Newt already in the first movie and he is not any better in this one. He is simply too nerdy and insecure for my taste. I prefer main protagonists that are more assertive and active. Having said that he is still a likable chap in general. Queenie is still annoying as hell though. I was v

First of all, just like in the last movie the acting in this film is excellent but with a few exceptions. Eddie Redmayne was still excellent as Newt but I think he did a better job in the first film. Same thing with Dan Fogler who didn’t seem as funny but useless and could have just been written out of this film. But I did really like Jude Law as a young Dumbledore and Joshua Shea who plays young Newt. Joshua played younger Newt so well that he actually looked like a younger version of Eddie. Jude Law brought the same kind of attitude towards Dumbledore that we all know and love. The special effects and set designs still looked marvellous. The creatures special effects just like last time were great and looked like if we saw them in real life that’s what they would look like. The sets looked directly like they got taken directly out of a history book. Now with this film being a sequel, you would think they would fix the problems they had in the last film but for this one, they didn‘t. The main thing that bugged me was Johnny Depp. He didn’t do a good job of playing the main villain. It could be because of the writing or just because of his acting. Next is all of the subplots. I cou