What’s Brown and Sticky
Fantastic Beasts: the Secrets of Dumbledore
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J.K. Rowling is a dollar billionaire. With that comes the power to fulfil your dreams. With that you could employ the best screenwriters, the best producers and directors. You could create something marvellous and inspirational. You could create something timeless and ground breaking. Instead she treads the same grubby path we are accustomed to seeing billionaires tread.
I’m not a massive fan of the Harry Potter films but they are eminently watch-able. They don’t inspire me to read the books but I have it on good authority that the books are worth reading. But if Harry Potter is the real deal then Fantastic Beasts is the Disneyfied spin off. The tricks are cheap and the effects are tacky. You can’t see the plot for the clichés. Where are the cloaks of invisibility that make story believable? The slights of hand that hide the mechanics? The credits of Fantastic Beasts: the Secrets of Dumbledore tell us that the screenplay, co-written by her, is a screenplay based on her own screenplay. This smacks of self indulgence and suggests this is part ego trip, part money making exercise and not part anything else.
One of my first thoughts, on sitting through the film, was of not believing in the story or any of the characters. The silly self animating coffee pots and teacups simply amplified the pointlessness. None of the plot lines were developed while some of the characters were obviously fillers, little more than extras given a few lines. And as the film progressed I became more and more irritated, not just by the unnecessary paraphernalia but by more egregious clichés and, ultimately, the emotional manipulation that is becoming a more ubiquitous bug bear for me.
Motifs and devices
In order to avoid spoilers I’ll simply mention the allusion to Nazi Germany in part of the film. Apart from this being a cheap play on the trope of authoritarianism, there was no sense of real menace — no abstract connection with reality that would make such an allusion worth creating. If felt like the film was less a story and more a string of devices serving the flimsy premise upon which the film was based. Which takes me to my chief gripe.
