6. Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald
In The Crimes of Grindelwald’s third scene, a character who we never learn anything about despite her constant presence throughout the entire movie murders a toddler, for no reason, just off screen. Even Michael Myers, famed slasher movie villain of the Halloween series, didn’t sink that low, although you could tell in the most recent one that he considered it for a moment.
This moment perfectly sets the tone for the rest of this movie: a grim, overly dramatic, mean-spirited entry into the Harry Potter universe. Fantastic Beasts 2 can accurately be described as a loosely connected series of mostly sequential events, though it’s often unclear how it gets from one scene to the next or why the characters do any of the things they do. Often, the next plot point just happens to appear wherever the characters already are, seemingly to save the filmmakers the trouble of establishing a sense of time or space. The movie also abandons almost every rule we know about magical spells, places, and people, trading the series’ long-established internal logic and consistency for large, ugly, confusing CG set pieces, like magical blue fire that inexplicably burns some people and not others, and eventually turns into several large dragons that attempt to destroy Paris.
Maybe worst of all, The Crimes of Grindelwald has no sense of wonder at its own magical world. Millions fell in love with Harry Potter because the wizarding world felt like a place you’d want to live, despite its bad elements. Inhabiting this movie’s magical alternate history for a couple of hours will just make you want to get obliviated so you can forget the whole thing. — Mike Rougeau
