The Fantastic Beasts films never quite captured the magic of the Potter franchise that inspired them. While the first film was a charming adventure generally without quite being as inspiring as the Potter films, the follow up got bogged down in unnecessarily complicated plots, rather tedious mysteries, and generally fumbled how to integrate them all together into an entertaining whole. The Secrets of Dumbledore is less of a mess but still struggles to find its footing and still remains uninspiring.
One of the biggest missed opportunities is the story of Dumbledore himself. One of modern literatures most beloved characters remains sidelined both literally and spiritually. In the series' desire to make this about Scamander and the other new characters, it purposefully keeps its most fascinating character on the edges. But also in the productions desire to not centre a homosexual hero, the film goes to great lengths to downplay the relationship between the title character and the story's main villain, and I believe this is very much a mistake. It's morally pretty shameful but even just for the purposes of the narrative, the film misses its mark. If the film had been more about Albus' conflicts centred in the story we would have had a much more compelling story and perhaps it might have somewhat atoned for the lack of any real sense of diversity within the Potter books and films themselves. The end builds to a wizard duel between Albus and Gallert that finally gets to the emotional punch that has been missing from these films all along but even that is truncated so as to mute the importance of their love.
The Fantastic Beasts series feels like a movie series made up on the fly. Characters that are important in one film are dropped entirely to the next. Plots begin and are dropped. The mysteries that are supposedly important to the narrative are solved, then revised, and then don't necessarily have the significance one thought they would. It all feels chaotic.
My recommendation: drop this series, let it be a trilogy and move on to another story in another corner of the Wizarding World that can be better planned out.
Fantastic Beasts The Secrets of Dumbledore
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Dan Folger, Jessica Williams, Mads Mikkelsen, Callum Turner, Ezra Miller, Alison Sudal, William Nadylam, Victoria Yeates, Poppy Corby-Tuech, Richard Coyle, Oliver Macucci, Fiona Glascott, Katherine Waterston
Director: David Yates
Writers: JK Rowling, Steve Kloves
No comments:
Post a Comment