At this point, it feels like the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series is one horrific on-set accident away from being included in a future season of Shudder’s Cursed Films series. What once seemed to be a promising quintology (good lord) exploring the history of J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World through the misadventures of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), magical zoologist and close confidant of Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) as a form of fascism rises through the land of Wizards and Witches right about the same time the Weimar Republic was starting to groan and burst at the seams. It had lots of things going for it — the return of director David Yates, who had guided the Harry Potter series to its well-received conclusion, an exciting new setting, a well-rounded cast who were mostly plucked from 2014’s list of Oscar nominees, and the full financial backing of Warner Bros. — but there were signs early on that things were going to be rough.
The first film was tepidly regarded, but the situation only became truly troubling in the interim between that and the second, The Crimes of Grindelwald, when Rowling began to reveal her true face to the world at large and almost eclipsed the legal troubles consuming Johnny Depp, bizarrely cast as the franchise’s big villain (indeed, He Who Shall Be Named in the Title of That Film). That, of course, led to all of the problems that beset the production of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which many were hoping would be a “return to form” or whatever for the franchise. Some, of course, were out of the production’s control, as COVID forced the film to be delayed for over a year, but others were homegrown: Depp was quickly fired and eventually replaced by Mads Mikkelsen (a net improvement, given that he’s one of three people on screen ever having any fun with the material), Rowling’s continued estrangement from her fanbase and the company as a result of her doubling-down on her beliefs, the off-screen issues facing series player Ezra Miller as a result of their bad behavior, and a dictate from Warner Bros that the film would have to make money while also having less of it to go around in the budget, compared to previous installments. I’m sure there’s more that I’m forgetting, but you get the point.
It shouldn’t be surprising that The Secrets of Dumbledore is a boring mess, full of muddled political allegory and forced seriousness, as the film struggles to accommodate the tastes of its creator and the desires of its audiences for “mature” entertainment in a fundamentally juvenile world without any acknowledgment of intentional and exaggerated camp or attempt to provide any audience other than the Potter-immersed with fun (see The Batman on how to do this properly). The film opens with the stammering Redmayne getting attacked by Grindelwald’s forces while he’s trying to assist in the birth of a deer-like creature endowed with a magical sense of righteousness and prophetic powers. The goons pull a Bambi and kill the mother, abducting the child so that their leader can slit its throat and see visions of the future in its blood while plotting to corrupt its central position in an election that’s about to take place in the Magical World, and Redmayne barely escapes with his life. Children’s cinema, everyone!
Aware of his former lover’s plans and skills, Dumbledore mobilizes a group of seemingly-useless wizards to try and save their world from a conflict with ours, given that Grindelwald wants to genocide those without pure magical blood. He also can’t act against him because of a magical love-blood pact, which undoubtedly will cause more controversy among certain sectors than it’s worth — those anecdotes about China cutting only six seconds from the release to remove all queer content are an accurate representation of the film’s approach to the two wizards’ relationship, and an ill-timed bathroom break could cause one to think that Law and Mikkelson were just really good pals (they’re also spectacularly inert: Dumbledore is the Ultimate Good, which is boring narratively, and Grindelwald is the Ultimate Bad, but at least Mikkelson gets to ham it up as he did in Hannibal). The ensemble is as large as one of Bay’s Transformers films and also matches those films in the number of locations we see, though each of them feels less realized than the Paris or New York of the previous installments.
As usual with the last few Fantastic Beasts films, Yates operates best when he’s indulging his sense of whimsy, mostly through the colorful array of critters that Redmayne has with him in his little suitcase. As mentioned before, there’s the faun-like creature that can sense the pure-hearted, but there’s also a silly helicopter-pufferfish-dragon hybrid that gets him out of a jam in one scene (never to be glimpsed again), a whole host of crab-like cephalopods, which fulfills Redmayne’s seemingly-contracted requirement to do a goofy-ass walk at least once in a picture for as long as they keep making them, as well as the adorable little twig-man and greedy gold-hoarding mongoose from the previous films. They’re responsible for the brief moments of levity straining under the weight of Rowling’s grandiose and hoary political metaphors, which mistake grit for seriousness like she’d suddenly been teleported back to 2004 and was asked to pitch a bad-ass version of the Teletubbies. This puts a strain on Yates, who deals with this forced seriousness by making things as dark and generic as possible; already possessing an already limited set of aesthetic skills, he tends to make things so muted and empty that they become almost inscrutable, free of the kind of detail that someone like Chris Columbus (who established a style for the series that almost everyone in his wake has struggled to emulate, given the series’ “maturation”) or the kind of naturalistic grounding that Alfonso Cuaron, perhaps his most-imitated influence within the series itself, gave to Azkaban.
Yet it’s fair to say that the chief blame for this disaster of a series lies with Rowling and Warner Bros, who plunged head-first into a prequel trilogy without having absorbed any of the lessons suffered by other would-be franchise-extenders. It would be natural to blame George Lucas for this trend, but, to be perfectly fair to him, the Star Wars prequels possessed a number of intrinsic qualities that none of its descendants came equipped with. Chiefly, it had a conflict to explore: there was an overarching villain to the franchise, whose rise to power was a motivating force in the corruption of Anakin Skywalker and his transformation into Darth Vader, which is also why J.J. Abrams returned to the Palpatine well in The Rise of Skywalker when all other routes proved to be too rocky at the conclusion of the sequel trilogy. It applied a more rigid structure to the whole of the franchise, closely tying the disparate ends of the Saga together, and though whether or not that was a good idea is a matter of opinion, it’s hard not to see why it was the path of least resistance. What Rowling lacks is that backbone, and the aimlessness of the series echoes Lucas’ own struggles — Why should we give a damn about any of these unmemorable characters? Why are we having lengthy political diatribes in a series of children’s films? Why are we retconning everything we knew about this world in order to make it feel relevant? — without any of the qualities that would emerge in later years through the continual evolution of Lucas’ prowess at trans-medium storytelling.
Yet there are few chances of that, given the state of the series, as there’s already talk that this may be the last Fantastic Beasts film, should the box office receipts not be good enough for Warner Bros., which is already in a precarious position thanks to years of mismanagement and its recent merger with Discovery. Whatever lust for exploration and wizarding wonder that the devoted have will likely be sated by the Hogwarts: Legacy video game coming later this year, a type of Knights of the Old Republic far-removed spin-off that looks to allow fans to reclaim some of this magic through the power of their own exploration. Given the dire state of The Secrets of Dumbledore, one has to wonder if fans are willing to put up with this bullshit in order to get some great on-screen reward in the future, as left on their own merits, they don’t really exist as films, but as an attempt to reclaim some measure of relevance for a series slowly fading into legend. Some things just aren’t meant to last.