Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

[Convectuoso]

4 hours ago, TheLoneWolf said:

I saw The Crimes of Grindelwald and was underwhelmed. It's not a bad movie, but it's certainly not as good as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. When it ended, I was thinking "Was that it?!"; it just felt incomplete.

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Grindelwald's escape in the beginning was unimaginative, did the prison not have any laundry carts for him to hide in? Polyjuice potion is fairly common in the wizarding world, so you'd think that the prison would've devised some sort of authentication system or test for it, especially since Grindelwald's supposed to be the most dangerous wizard in the world.

Queenie's storyline made no sense. As a powerful Legilimens, she can easily see through the clever words that Grindelwald and his followers espouse. Even an ordinary person can see that Grindelwald looks upon no-maj's with contempt. It's utterly preposturous to think that Grindelwald would give his blessing to a marriage between a wizard and a lowly no-mag. I know denial can make people to weird things, but this is just bad writing.

I was also disappointed with that reveal that Credance is a Dumbledore. I've never been a fan of the trope where the major characters are related to each other in some way. J.K. Rowling managed to avoid this trope with the Harry Potter books, but it looks like she couldn't resist it any longer.

 

My thoughts exactly 

[TheLoneWolf]

On 11/28/2018 at 5:52 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Do you mean Voldemort's motivations in the books or the movies?  I ask because I felt a lot of his Freudian excuse fell victim to the inevitable perils of story compression for the silver screen.  They got the ball rolling on Grindelwald's motivations a lot earlier on, so he has three more movies to really get into why he's a total bastard (and the books never did get into why he's a muggle-hater beyond "he's Wizard Hitler, go with it".)

I'm referring to the movies. I saw most of them before I started reading the books and thought that Voldemort's backstory and motivations were pretty flimsy in them. Obviously the movies could only cover so much material, but I think they missed a golden opportunity to give him more substance. As the primary villain of multiple movies, it's a shame he didn't get more.

Spoiler

On 11/28/2018 at 5:52 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's kind of an easy remark to miss since it comes in the middle of a largely unrelated conversation in the previous movie, but Queenie does admit to Newt that she has great difficulty reading foreign people (people "with accents").  Newt's British English was enough to throw her off her game, and the native French-speakers in France seem to be totally impenetrable to her.  Grindelwald's supporters in this movie are mostly, if not entirely, members of the French wizarding community and Grindelwald is implied to be from one of the German-speaking nations in central Europe.  She wouldn't be able to read any of them.

You know, I completely forgot about that line. That would explain a lot. Good catch!

Spoiler

On 11/28/2018 at 5:52 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's almost certainly a red herring.

It's something I noticed while I was checking my girlfriend's hunch that McGonagall shouldn't have been in the film (sure enough, she was born in 1935).  Credence's date of birth is given on the adoption papers prop from the first Fantastic Beasts movie as 9 November 1904, though The Crimes of Grindelwald's screenplay gives it as 1901 instead.  Albus Dumbledore's father was sent to Azkaban in either 1891 or 1892 and died there, and his mother was killed in 1899.  Whoever Credence really is, he's no sibling of Albus Dumbledore's.  He's at least ten years too young to be a Dumbledore.  

(The only other living relative Dumbledore had was known to have was a spinster aunt who never married after her fiance was discovered doing something indecent with a rather phallic magical creature.)

A red herring is definitely an intriguing idea and I'll tip my hat to J.K. Rowling if that's what it's going to come down to. I just hope that Credence doesn't end up being a cousin from a forgotten or lost line of Dumbledores.

I also noticed the McGonagall anachrnonism. Since J.K. Rowling isn't the type of person to make such a careless mistake, to me the most obvious explanation would be that she's using a Time-Turner (with the Headmaster's blessing I hope). We'll see what Rowling pulls out of her hat.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, TheLoneWolf said:

I'm referring to the movies. I saw most of them before I started reading the books and thought that Voldemort's backstory and motivations were pretty flimsy in them. Obviously the movies could only cover so much material, but I think they missed a golden opportunity to give him more substance. As the primary villain of multiple movies, it's a shame he didn't get more.

Oh, monstrously so... the overwhelming majority of his motivation came from the backstory that The Half-Blood Prince left on the cutting room floor in favor of focusing on Ron and Hermione's personal problems.  As a result, he comes off more as in it "4 teh evulz" rather than an almost tragic, hopelessly broken person whose quest for identity went awry in the worst possible way.

Grindelwald got hit with it a bit in his brief cameo in The Deathly Hallows Part 2.  Instead of being a repentant prisoner who lies to Voldemort's face in a bid to prevent him from going and desecrating Dumbledore's tomb, he's a gleefully evil prick who tells Voldemort exactly where to find what he's looking for.

 

Spoiler

11 hours ago, TheLoneWolf said:

A red herring is definitely an intriguing idea and I'll tip my hat to J.K. Rowling if that's what it's going to come down to. I just hope that Credence doesn't end up being a cousin from a forgotten or lost line of Dumbledores.

I also noticed the McGonagall anachrnonism. Since J.K. Rowling isn't the type of person to make such a careless mistake, to me the most obvious explanation would be that she's using a Time-Turner (with the Headmaster's blessing I hope). We'll see what Rowling pulls out of her hat.

There's no other chronologically-sound explanation for it, really.

I can't imagine a maximum-security facility like Azkaban would allow conjugal visits... not that a building crawling with soul-eating monsters that literally suck the happiness out of the air would be conducive to a thing like that.  So Perceval Dumbledore can't have fathered any more kids after being sent to Azkaban, and we know Kendra Dumbledore's life basically revolved around keeping her daughter's condition (probable obscurial) under wraps until she was accidentally killed by her in 1899.  There's just no way for him to be a sibling of Albus and Aberforth's.  Word of God from Rowling herself is that Albus was gay and that he never let himself love anyone after his brief affair with Grindelwald, so no kids there.  Aberforth was a lifelong bachelor implied by Rowling to engage in indecent acts with his pet goats, so no help there either.

Time turners are only good for a maximum of five hours backwards travel, so it would appear to be a careless mistake on Rowling's part... she did write a story where a time turner could go back farther (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) but it was explicitly a one-of-a-kind prototype created in 2020.

 

 

 

[Dobber]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Oh, monstrously so... the overwhelming majority of his motivation came from the backstory that The Half-Blood Prince left on the cutting room floor in favor of focusing on Ron and Hermione's personal problems.  As a result, he comes off more as in it "4 teh evulz" rather than an almost tragic, hopelessly broken person whose quest for identity went awry in the worst possible way.

Grindelwald got hit with it a bit in his brief cameo in The Deathly Hallows Part 2.  Instead of being a repentant prisoner who lies to Voldemort's face in a bid to prevent him from going and desecrating Dumbledore's tomb, he's a gleefully evil prick who tells Voldemort exactly where to find what he's looking for.

 

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There's no other chronologically-sound explanation for it, really.

I can't imagine a maximum-security facility like Azkaban would allow conjugal visits... not that a building crawling with soul-eating monsters that literally suck the happiness out of the air would be conducive to a thing like that.  So Perceval Dumbledore can't have fathered any more kids after being sent to Azkaban, and we know Kendra Dumbledore's life basically revolved around keeping her daughter's condition (probable obscurial) under wraps until she was accidentally killed by her in 1899.  There's just no way for him to be a sibling of Albus and Aberforth's.  Word of God from Rowling herself is that Albus was gay and that he never let himself love anyone after his brief affair with Grindelwald, so no kids there.  Aberforth was a lifelong bachelor implied by Rowling to engage in indecent acts with his pet goats, so no help there either.

Time turners are only good for a maximum of five hours backwards travel, so it would appear to be a careless mistake on Rowling's part... she did write a story where a time turner could go back farther (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) but it was explicitly a one-of-a-kind prototype created in 2020.

 

 

 

I just he assumed he is the other part of the sister. Wasn’t it explained that the obscuri split a person or something. I thought that was what the one guy explained to Newt and Tina.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 minutes ago, Dobber said:

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I just he assumed he is the other part of the sister. Wasn’t it explained that the obscuri split a person or something. I thought that was what the one guy explained to Newt and Tina.

Spoiler

... if it weren't for a line from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, that would have made for an INCREDIBLE twist.

Talk about missing a golden opportunity!  How badly would THAT have messed Dumbledore up if Credence were a leftover fragment of the dead sister that's already weighing heavily on his conscience?

An obscurus doesn't have a mind of its own.  It's like Dr. Banner turning into the Hulk, it's an alternate form controlled by their emotional state.  Newt says something about them being parasitic magical forces that can't survive without their host when he's talking to Graves/Grindelwald in the first one, right before Graves/Grindelwald slips up and asks if it's useless without its host.

 

[Mazinger]

1 hour ago, Dobber said:

 

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I just he assumed he is the other part of the sister. Wasn’t it explained that the obscuri split a person or something. I thought that was what the one guy explained to Newt and Tina.

 

Midichlorians! Lucas was right!!

[no3Ljm]

It's not as exciting as the first one but it was ok. Felt like HP3. It's the total opposite of the first movie. It was ok. Looking forward to the conclusion.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

On 11/30/2018 at 6:27 PM, no3Ljm said:

It's not as exciting as the first one but it was ok. Felt like HP3. It's the total opposite of the first movie. It was ok. Looking forward to the conclusion.

The conclusion's another three movies off... the original production plan for Fantastic Beasts was a trilogy, but shortly before Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them came out they decided to extend it from three movies to five.

WB's plan of record for Fantastic Beasts is, according to their press releases, to gradually phase Newt out as a protagonist and cover more of Grindelwald's reign of terror and end on Grindelwald's defeat at the hands of Albus Dumbledore in 1945.  It'll be interesting to see where they go with it, considering J.K. Rowling has hinted many times that Grindelwald was connected somehow to the Nazis and that wizards covertly supported the Allies in the war in Europe.

[Dobber]

They sort of hinted to that in this movie with the vision of WWII.

Chris

[sh9000]