Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Said Jewish characters are either downplayed in the later movies because of her actress, and the other joins Grindelwald.

Also Queenie drugged her love interest. She's a psychopath if you ask me. Not a very good look for JK's attempt at representation.

And don't even get me started on Lestrange who was JK's attempt at writing an interracial woman.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Nov 26th 2023 at 7:24:46 PM

Yes, but that was when Grindelwald was stopping the Holocaust.

And love potions are things the Weasley Brothers do.

So perfectly okay!

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 26th 2023 at 3:26:13 AM

The Weasleys sell love potions yeah, but Queenie drugged Jacob with a love potion and took him to Paris so she could marry him against his will.

That's a whole different level of fucked up.

Heck, Queenie only joined Grindelwald because he promised her she could marry Jacob, not because she wants to stop the holocaust.

So very disturbing set of priorities.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Nov 26th 2023 at 7:26:33 PM

IIRC the goblins being jews thing is something that's maybe there, maybe isn't in the books but then the movies and Hogarts:Legacy game really played it up rather than reducing it.

Hogwarts Legacy isn't written by Rowling is it? So that would be solely on the developers.

Especially since Rowling wouldn't put a positive trans in there.

There's more so wrong with this because she's drugging him because the laws are against interracial marriage among America's Mages.

And Jacob supports them.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 26th 2023 at 3:50:05 AM

Yeah, I wasn't blaming her. The costume and set design for the films and the game developers seem to have added stuff way beyond what she wrote. That's on them but it doesn't excuse the films and the game having it.

Edited by dcutter2 on Nov 26th 2023 at 11:56:19 AM

I mean, either way, Queenie is still kidnapping someone, drugging him so she can marry him against his wishes.

That is just terrible behavior in general regardless of the context.

@Who Katherine Waterston had COVID during filming. That's why she wasn't in much of it.

I was slow to pick up on the stereotyping certainly. Same with the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy as well.

They clearly realized the pacing issue since Steve Kloves returned to help write SoD—and it's abundantly clear that Rowling is NOT a film writer due to being too used to writing books. Kloves needed to come back sooner and as you can see though, it didn't really help as much as it should've. Heck, the current draft of my script with the most content right now is almost 200 pages.

Would've liked to see the FB films through to the very end. Given the third movie had such an uphill battle after CoG got the negative reaction it did—and for other reasons as well, it's just not realistic at this point though. At least the movie felt like an ending despite not being planned as one (which Allegiant kind of did too at first, but now without Ascendant, it feels way more incomplete at this point though).

Sure during filming, but what about the screenplay? Would they have put Tina in a bigger role if her actress didn't catch COVID?

I've been thinking about it and I think that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them should have been a standalone movie that mentioned Grindelwald gaining power but didn't feature him. And then there should have been a different prequel movie or movies that was actually about the war against Grindelwald and his conflict with Dumbledore and didn't have to shoehorn in magical creatures just to keep the title relevant and could have either Dumbledore as the main character or, if Rowling and co feel that him being a protagonist would ruin his mystique or whatever, have the main character be someone who is connected to Grindelwald in some way and has a reason to stop him or who makes more sense as proxy for Dumbledore than a random magizoologist and his buddies. Those movies could reference Fantastic Beasts the way MCU movies reference each other and maybe keep some characters around but without being direct sequels.

I feel like Rowling should have written a new trilogy or series and then let actual writers and directors adapt them.

I suspect she wanted to branch out into writing screenplays given how involved she got with the series.

So that's why we didn't get an actual book about this series. Only the fake text book.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Nov 26th 2023 at 8:49:24 PM

Definitely. This movie really feels like a shitty adaptation of a book that doesn't actually exist.

Again, woman built her career out of writing books. So of course these movies felt like literal books for that reason. With whatever issues you got with how the HP books were adapted, AT LEAST they felt like films and the same clearly can't be said here.

Biggest issue was making it a five film series rather than a trilogy. It meant having to pace out or add in too many things and it was clearly a problem. We could've been done with the story by the end of this movie and instead, the Sequel Hook entry I wrote on SoD's film page has to basically fill in the gaps instead now.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Nov 26th 2023 at 4:57:55 AM

I liked the first movie.

Crimes and Secrets were "meh" .

Too many retcons, out of nowhere twists, and no clear overall story.

To be fair, the first three Harry Potter's books were also episodic in nature, but still.

Edited by jawal on Nov 26th 2023 at 2:45:08 PM

Yeah the first one was the best one, and it feels like a complete story.

Must have been part of why it was so difficult for Rowling to make a sequel with the cast feel natural.

The other 2 movies are just pure failures in my book.

I appreciated how much CoG was stuffed with when I saw it certainly. It was mostly just setup for what was next though. That's not how you make a movie.

I feel like that's a trend we have nowadays. Instead of making a movie or a show that tells a contained story, we make a movie or a show that is setting up another movie or show to the point where what we watch feels like an extended preview. Maybe I'm reaching there but I can't help but feel like this is a side effect of MCU imitation. Maybe it's not. I dunno, maybe I'm alone on this.

One thing I do know is that JK Rowling struggles with the transition from writing a book and writing a screenplay when it comes to the Fantastic Beasts series. The type of writing that would be fine, or just acceptable, from the perspective of a novel doesn't work in a movie. You can't just have long bouts of exposition and people just going from one setting to another when you only have so much dialogue you can cram in. What works in a book doesn't always work for a movie.

The key to each of the Harry Potter movies is that not one of them felt like it just existed for whatever came next. You look at recent chapters like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Halloween Kills—and to a lesser extent Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Stranger Things 4, they often exist just to set the stage for the finale that follows.

The FB movies had that issue and it was gonna expand three movies in the middle had it made it to five overall.

I probably have the worst possible take on Harry Potter as a series. Currently writing mini essays on each movie.

If I had to summarize, my take is that the series should be about silly wacky fun and not take itself seriously because it's when it's silly fantasy that when it's at its best. Whenever it tries to be too dark I think it's actually worse.

Personally, I think one of the strengths of the series is that it grew with the reader, and became gradually more serious.

The Matilda like tone of the early books, while entertaining, would have stagnated sooner or later, so the series move to more mature themes served it well.

Beside, "wackiness" stayed at least until book 5 if not 6.

Edited by jawal on Nov 26th 2023 at 6:11:29 PM

The FB movies definitely tried to have it both ways: whimsy for kids, serious business for adults. It was not good at that balance. Most of the James Bond movies are PG, but they’re not for kids and kids probably shouldn't watch them though.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Nov 26th 2023 at 9:30:52 AM

I really wish that FB movies remained just about animals really.

Also as stated before, I find it absolutely dumb that a magical community relies on an animal bowing to someone to see them as a leader.

Just to clarify, they DON"T actually rely on a magical animal to decide who the next leader is, it's just basically a major campaign booster to show that candidate is pure of heart and that means people will be more likely to vote for them.

Even if said candidate is openly talking about murdering people they don't like. Then again, we can name a couple of people in history who got elected based on promises to kill people society found undesirable.

Regarding the whole "Grindewald trying to stop the Holocaust" claim, upon watching that vision scene, the impression I got was Grindewald trying to scare his audience by showing them how destructive science can become and how it will allow muggles to surpass wizards in a hypothetical muggle vs wizard war. W/c would have been a good idea where it not for the fact that this movie is a prequel to Harry Potter not a sequel.