Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Plot Holes

Photo source: Wikipedia

Photo source: Wikipedia

Chase Schwarz, Correspondent

Set six months after the first installment in the Fantastic Beasts series, the Crimes of Grindelwald build upon largely what was set up in the first one. This movie uses the same tropes of fantastic animals, bright colors and lovable goof “sam gamgee”-esque characters that made the first movie enjoyable. However, like the first film it doesn’t quite submerge you into the world as the Harry Potter films did. For the average fan, this movie was a bit hard to follow as many major plot points consist of references to relatively obscure Potter knowledge.

The movie starts out slow as Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) easily breaks out of

MACUSA (Magical Congress of U.S.A) control. He picks up followers on the way with a lack of dialogue and weird shots of Depp leaning at a 45-degree angle. This makes for a boring introduction to the supposedly “fantastic” film. The movie continues this way, building up the plot and bringing in old characters as if to say “Hey, remember this character?” and doing sherlock holmes style investigating to find Credence (Ezra Miller). But, what was a breath of fresh air for this movie was bringing in characters from the Harry Potter series like Albus Dumbledore and Nagini.

At the start of the second half, Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald started to pick up. With more action and more beasts, this movie felt as fantastic as the first. Then the plot holes came. More and more subplots were interwoven which created a more breadth over depth feel to the movie. With all the different subplots it made the viewers feel that Rowling forgot that in Deathly Hallows all of Dumbledore’s family was mentioned so it would be impossible for Credence (Aurelius) to be his brother. Also, Dumbledore mentions McGonagall as a teacher but canonically she wasn’t even born at that time. On top of all that the main villain feels like a flamboyant nationalistic politician reminiscent of a Hitler or Stalin around that time rather than magic wielding, scary, psycho that Lord Voldemort was. The whole movie just felt like a build up for the next movie, like the Hobbit, with the only real climax being a Neo-Nazi meeting with some fire.