Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

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Which is also harder to deal with. Actors leaving big roles are hard to deal with. Had they recast him after Fantasic Beasts, it'd be a bit easier since he had maybe 5 mins of screen time. After a sequel named after the recasted character? Much harder.

I mean, look at the different performances turned in between Richard Harris and Michael Gambon. They're such totally different takes on the character (admitedly, ones that work better for those films as they were written).

I guess my problem is that everything AROUND Depp makes me fear Grindelwald, but he himself isn't doing anything for me. The voice doesn't fit this Scandenavian Wizard Hitler we've built up, the hair cut just... looks a bit off to me too.

I mean, I'm also not a huge fan of Jude Law's Dumbledore either. Of what I expected Dumbledore to look like when he was a teacher, suit and tie would not have breached the top 10. We went from everyone wearing suit and ties at Hogwarts to Flitwick being the odd one out speficially for wearing a suit? He was so eccentric and odd that I wish that were coming across more so far.

Idk. Maybe it'll be addressed by I'm just feeling really off-put by a lot of this.

And help explain why he was willing to just give up and die in the first book. Not to mention why basically no one besides Voldemort even cared that someone had invented immortality. Age Without Youth isn't the worst fate in the world, but it's certainly not the greatest, either.

100% in agreement. Like, if he wasn't name dropped, I'd never guess he's supposed to be Dumbledore. He doesn't sound or look or act like him, and the modern dress style just looks off.

Edited by Ghilz on Jul 22nd 2018 at 10:38:59 AM

I think at this point they might have retconned wizard dress code. I imagine it's pretty limiting from a costume department's perspective, since there's a lot they can normally say with clothing that they can't say with identical dull black robes. In the first film you can handwave wizarding America as just being different in that way from wizarding Britain (and Newt got some tips before he arrived), but now...

That's why I was ok with it in Fantastic Beasts. Its a completely different country with different norms. Arguably, MACUSA was allowed to reinvent what 'Wizard' means without the 'folklore' route that European Wizards had stuck to out of pride, stubborness, or ignorance of the muggle world. They were apparently leaving europe like most of the colonists anyway so it makes sense they might want to escape how their former peers dressed.

Newt felt like a good bridge as he had rather normal looking clothes, but the garrish colors made him odd and really pop compared to the rather drab suits of 1920s NYC.

Plus it felt more natural to the Urban Fantasy feel of Fantastic where the magic was more integrated with the muggle world and thus the costumes would stand out more if they were... not 1920s safe.

In this one... No, it feels almost like a retcon. European Wizards were quirky and didn't get muggle clothes. Hell, I'm surprised they know enough to give the students such a conventional uniform. Flitwick is the odd one out for wearing a suit and, even then, that trait wasn't adopted until the third film and I'd also like to point out that one of Umbridges defining costume choices is a pink sweater, pumps, and a skirt which make her stand out considerably from the rest of the Hogwarts staff like Mc Gonagall's emerald robes.

Costumes really should evoke the character and tell the audience something about the character even if its a detail that they might otherwise get from the set or performance. Umbridge is covered in so much pink you can't miss her in any shot and the colors clash so much with all of the other costumes and aesthetics that she's simply unplesant in every shot. Even in her own domain, she gets lost in the sea of pink and that works REALLY WELL for her character. She fights against everyone else's beat, but is overwhelming when she is in full power.

This is more of an animation/video game character design thing, but there's a rule there that character shilouetes and color palates shouldn't overlap much. The audience should be able to tell one character from another at a glance using shape and color alone. Snape is in blacks with a cloak that he gets hidden in, while Dumbledore wears pastell pinks and blues and Mc Gonagall can be seen in the early films with bright emerald robes and her pointed hat, which get replaced later with black dress robes with very pointed shoulder pads which give her more teeth.

I get none of that from the costumes here in Fantastic Beasts 2. If you lined up all of these men, I would never be able to tell you which one is Dumbledore based on their character description. I just couldn't. Maybe this is because 1930s and 1940s men's fashion was so constraining, but wouldn't the garrish and odd robes be just that much more freeing from a design perspective?

What I find galling is that this isn't even all that long before Dumbledore's flashback appearances in Chamber of Secrets and Half-Blood Prince. Apparantly he went from a fancy dressed tweed suit guy to a Wizard Classic in the span of about a decade.

The movies have been downplaying that aspect for a long time now. It's not a new concept here.

The Hogwarts teachers were the only ones who really kept to the Wizard Dress code (Well, them and Voldemort).

Even then, Slughorn could pass for a muggle.

It's the first time it's been applied to Dumbledore. It comes off as out of character for him. Even when going undercover as a Muggle at Tom Riddle's orphanage, he dressed in flashy and flamboyant colours.

I don't think that's true. Remember all the descriptions of wizards trying and failing to look like Muggles at the Quidditch world cup?

He means film wise.

Indeed.

In regards to Johnny Depp being Grindelwald, I honestly don't care about the drama outside the role, such as the debacle with Amber Heard. The acting is all that matters, and so far, the Comic-Con trailer does a damn good job at showing his more nuanced performance. But we will wait and see until the film's release.

Depp!Grindelwald was a bit bleh in the first film, understandably given he only popped up in the very end of the end (and technically Colin Farrell actually gave us a really good Grindelwald under another name.)

That said, Depp is not a bad actor if he doesn't resort to make up and funny accents so I won't write him off yet. Good writing could make for interesting debate (in and out of verse) as to what makes he and his cause compelling.

From what it seems like in the books, Grindelwald's views were a lot like the Ministry's under Voldemort: Wizards throwing off their shackles of secrecy and subjugating Muggles.

I’m honestly surprised Voldemort didn’t make much headway in conquering the Muggle world during the nearly-a-whole-year he ran the Ministry through a puppet.

I would assume he'd want to conquer the Wizarding World first. Just because he has the Ministry doesn't mean everyone will follow their rules.

The books kind of leave us with the impression Voldemort was only in control of one ministry, and effectively slammed the door on the wider magical world while suppressing and hunting down dissenters there in Britain. He was ruling from the shadows and used control of the press and bureaucracy to make everything look legitimate on the surface; and presumably left the rest of the world wondering what happened to wizarding Britain-with Voldemort's cover story of Scrimgeour retiring and Britain beset by all sorts of problems that could conceivably lead them to temporarily closing borders. The only dissenting voices after Lovegood was silenced would have been the underground broadcasts by the resistance, and any firsthand accounts from people who escaped.

Based on what we see of the alternate timeline in HPATCC, he would have eventually gone global, but the magical world still seems separate from the mortal world even then.

Edited by ViperMagnum357 on Aug 17th 2018 at 8:38:20 AM

Voldemort not taking over the Muggle World also makes thematic sense as he's meant to contrast with Harry. Like Harry, Voldemort is also an Orphan who found out he was magical and had this great legacy. Only he embraced it in a far darker way. I don't think Voldemort really cares about conquering the muggle world because he despises it. In the long term he'd no doubt abolish the statute of secrecy and let wizards rule over muggle, but I feel that never was his goal. His goal was always controlling the world he cared about. The Wizarding World.

And of course it makes thematic Sense with Harry too. Harry does care only about the Wizarding World. The Muggle World stands more as a symbol of their own miserable childhoods.

Edited by Ghilz on Aug 22nd 2018 at 4:24:23 AM

Final trailer:

Apparently Nagini is actually an Asian woman.

Why. Why, JKR?

Wut. That's messed up/gross, although more than Unfortunate Implications, it seems like bad writing, because Nagini in the HP books is quite clearly just an animal, albeit maybe with a certain extra something that comes from being a member of a Monstrous Race (I think that's the D&D term for this kind of thing?) So somewhere between a random warg and Shelob and in neither case should their be a reveal of those creates being in a human form and having conversations.

Not sure how I feel about the Nagini thing, but otherwise I quite enjoyed this trailer. I'm definitely going to see this opening weekend.

“Hi, so Voldemort owned a slave the whole time and nobody cared enough to save her.”

Reception in Korea from viewers of HP and Claudia Kim has also been negative.

Okay, I haven't read the Fantastic Beasts book, but was Nagini beign an Asian woman in the books as well?

There's nothing mentioned about it.  If I recall, Dumbledore does say that Nagini seems to be the one being other than himself that Voldemort seems to maybe actually care about.  So I don't know that there's anything flat-out contradicting it in the books either TBF.