First Takes - Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)

hi this weekend I finished my run through the Fantastic Beasts series and completed my viewing of The Wizarding World movies by watching the third and apparently last film in the Run Fantastic Beasts the secrets of Dumbledore it follows on from the previous two films with the world of the 1930s seeing the Wizards in conflict with gallet gindel Val the wizard version of Hitler gaining more and more followers while Dumbledore the Headmaster of Hogwarts and played by Jude Law maneuvering his own porns to try and bring him down before he can bring chaos and conflict to the worlds of magic and non-magic people it's very hard to talk about the plot in any detail because I saw the film two days ago and I've already forgotten almost entirely what happened but it largely seems to involve gindel Val attempting to take control of the Wizarding World by G winning the election to be the new Wizard president um but rather than being decided by the votes of The Wizarding people it's instead the result of being chosen by a magical animal which bows down in the presence of someone who is pure of heart so obviously this guy is really really pure of heart and fully expects this to work and as a result he is uh found one of these animals a Chillin which sounds silly and um has zombified it so that it'll do his bidding uh while Dumbledore and his assistant team led by nutes Commander the magical zoologist uh retrieve another chilling and try and do something to prevent all this from happening and the whole thing is just terrible um it's a very very obvious um satire on the rise of Hitler and the rise of contemporary far right politics and it's so dull and so lazy and so uninteresting uh one of the interesting things about the movies is that gindel Val has to be recast with every movie in the first film he's played by Colin Farrell but in Disguise as somebody else and it's revealed at the end that he's actually uh played by Johnny Depp Depp plays the character throughout the second film but then the allegations and court cases that arose then during pre-production meant that he was replaced for the third film and is now played by Ma mikkelson mikkelson had has been a bond villain he's been an Indiana Jones villain he's played Hannibal leca he can do this sort of thing in his sleep and in this movie it looks like he is because he is so unengaged so bed seeming by what's going on no one really seems to have that much engagement in what's happening I think and it comes down to the the problem of just the script um JK Rowling wrote the first two Scripts on our own uh original material not based on any previous book uh for this third film Steve Clovis who wrote most of the Harry Potter films was brought him to work with her and it does struggle to give the film some kind of shape some kind of structure some kind of organization so that we understand what's happening and why but there are so many characters there was at least a dozen major characters all with their own plots all with their own storylines fighting for attention and the film feels massively overstuffed borderline and coherent and it's really hard to care about what's happening because there is so much fighting for your attention there is nothing that is coming out as the main plot thread and as a result the film just feels slapped together and sloppy another problem is one issue of production which is that production had been intended to start shooting had been intended to start the day that the lockdown was announced and so production was suspended the day they were supposed to start filming and wound up being delayed for more than six months um and as a consequence of the downtime um also three of the female cast became pregnant during the intervening months two of them had to be written out and the other had to be filmed around because they couldn't lose her and as a result we have characters just Vanishing from the the movie the movie's overall story line we have the main love interest and a significant supporting player from the first two films who barely appears this time it all just feels desperate and shoddy and halfast um you know there are Productions there are issues that are just a matter of production problems but when you're losing major members of the cast for because of pregnancy and health reasons it suggests that you need to do more to fix this because you can't just drop them out of the story and then not have anything matter um the movie was effectively a flop it was the first of the Wizarding World films to lose money at the box office making less than 100 million in the US and we've been told that although the movie ends with perhaps the inference of Further Adventures and um the further battle against gindl Val that it probably wouldn't happen and it does end fairly satisfyingly with gindel Val apparently defeated for good although still a free man we're not getting any further Fantastic Beasts movies instead Warner Brothers has decided to remake the original Harry Potter novels as um limited series runs for HBO Max uh this is clearly I I think a terrible idea um but um you know they've not been short of terrible ideas before this um secrets of D I mean when the secrets of doubled door are actually revealed they're not particularly interesting um naming the movie after them was a bad idea and that there should have been some effort at at structure at story at having some kind of shape to all of this rather than just assuming you could do a five movie series and the audience would remain interested for the whole time despite the sloppiness of the writing and the disinterested nature of the production instead we have three movies the first of which is passible the second is not the third is just about adequate and it really just looks like trying to squeeze the last drops out of the orange