Bad luck persists in the saga Fantastic Beastswhich Warner had announced as a pentalogy scripted by JK Rowling and directed by David Yates (helming four of the eight films Harry Potter), which retraces the events that took place some sixty years before the birth of the famous bespectacled wizard.
It started slowly in 2016: despite its success at the box office, Fantastic Beasts was criticized for Eddie Redmayne’s “bizarre” performance as Norbert Scamander, the story’s pivotal magizoologist; and, above all, for its breaks in tone where the slap stick intended for the youngest rubbed shoulders with the darkness of an overly dense plot. It continued in 2018 with The Crimes of Grindelwald : if Jude Law was unanimous in Dumbledore in the prime of life, nothing was going well for Johnny Depp, the interpreter of Grindelwald, whose escapades then accusations of domestic violence made the headlines. These are added, in 2020, the comments considered transphobic issued by JK Rowling.
And it continues with Ezra Miller who, also two years ago, was filmed grabbing a woman by the throat in Reykjavik and who, just before the release of Dumbledore’s Secrets (The Secrets of Dumbledore in VO), was arrested for his violent behavior against a couple in Hawaii. However, the young actor embodies Croyance Bellebosse, one of the (very dark) hearts of the franchise: the fate, the power, the true identity of his character caused shock after shock in the first two parts. The same is true in this third, where his resemblance to a young Professor Snape (the late Alan Rickman in the Harry Potter) is also troubling.
Will he be fired from the saga (and from the DC Cinematic Universe where he plays Barry Allen/The Flash, also produced by Warner)? Johnny Depp was replaced by a perfect Mads Mikkelsen in his reptilian coldness and sporting a Hitlerian haircut. It’s no accident: darker and narratively more solid (the name of veteran Steve Kloves, who signed seven of the eight adaptations of Harry Potter, appears in the screenplay, close to that of JK Rowling), this third opus takes place in the 1930s, in Great Britain, China and… in Berlin, where a voice rises whose intentions, among Muggles, recall those of Grindelwald for wizards. Conquest of the world, racial purity…
However, because of a blood pact, Dumbledore cannot face the one who was once his great love and asks for Dragonneau’s help. To fulfill the mission, he surrounds himself with a mismatched team made up of his brother (Callum Turner), his assistant (Victoria Yeates), everyone’s favorite no-maj pastry chef (Dan Fogler), who thus flies to the rescue from his beloved witch (Alison Sudol), etc.
To this, we must of course add the fantastic animals – creatures in computer graphics always so successful. If the adorable Pickett and Teddy are back and cause smiles, their performance is limited in a feature film that neglects the youngest. We have proof of this from the tragic birth of the Qilin, an animal from Chinese mythology that has the power to “read” hearts and whose blood prolongs life. We understand that Dumbledore and Grindelwald do not see it with the same eye.
In short, if there is – for those who want to see them – a lot of wealth and promise in Dumbledore’s secrets, while the visual effects are always impressive and the art direction, sumptuous, there are also a lot of characters and a lot of subplots. The same reproach was made to the previous parts and… wasn’t it the same for the Harry Potterr? Which, however, were anchored in novels that everyone had read or could read in order to clear up this or that mystery. It must therefore be remembered here that JK Rowling knows absolutely everything about the world that she has imagined and that with her, everything has a reason for being and everything will find its conclusion. One day. The unknown, here, is of another nature: will the two other films be made? And that, bad luck obliges, is not sure.