We are now two films into the Harry Potter spin-off prequel series
Fantastic Beasts and I think it's safe to say that the new films have not lived up to their predecessors.
But while I didn't particularly enjoy the original Newt Scamander adventure, I did enjoy Newt Scamander
himself, as well as the group of characters
surrounding him and I felt that there was a lot of promise for the series to improve. Which was
immediately squandered by the Crimes of Grindelwald,
a plotting, depressing, meandering sequel that is mostly concerned with setting up future films than telling a satisfying
standalone story. So how did this happen?
Earlier this year, I made a video looking at some of the techniques J.K. Rowling
regularly used to create effective mysteries in the Harry Potter novels.
My main point was that even though the Harry Potter universe is filled with magic and the solutions to the mysteries can be absurd answers,
like oh, it was the rat all along!
Rowling always made sure that the mystery was a fair game for the reader. The answers were
artfully hidden in the text and with a little detective reasoning of your own, you could potentially figure out what was going on. And
even if you didn't, the sense that the game was fair, made the final reveal satisfying. "I'm...
the half blood prince."
But the mysteries in the Fantastic Beasts films are either too obvious or too
convoluted to work effectively. This is only one of the reasons these films don't quite work but given how
successful Rowling has been at writing mysteries in the past, I wanted to take a look at why that
skill hasn't translated as well into her screenwriting.
In the first film, the central mystery is about figuring out the identity of the Obscurial, which is a sort of
magical parasite that latches on to young wizards and lets them turn into Galactus. The problem is that it is just
painfully obvious that the answer is Credence. I mean to begin with he just looks
suspicious in every scene. The camera, the lighting, the costume, everything about the way he
appears puts him at the top of our list of
suspects. It's sort of like wondering which one of the noblemen of Rohan is secretly aligned with the Dark Lord.
Who could it be?
Could it be...
him? But on top of the way he is visually portrayed, the story never gives us another viable
suspect. We're pretty certain early on that the culprit is one of the kids in the anti-magic
group but Credence is the only one among them that has given any kind of characterization.
A few more scenes building up these characters would have worked wonders to divide our suspicions. The film does try to trick us into
suspecting the younger sister but only by cutting to her every so often. The character doesn't have a story of her own,
unlike Credence. Later, after Creedence is bullied by a politician,
"Here you go, freak!" that politician gets murdered by the
Obscurial. So we know that Credence has a motive for committing the crime. The fact that the story is told from multiple perspectives
doesn't help things. In a Harry Potter story, we would only have heard about this scene when Harry did and it could have been the
key clue to figuring out the mystery. Seeing things in chronological
order here makes it feel like the film is telling us, with blinking neon lights, that this is the guy we're looking for. It actually
feels
so obvious you start thinking that it must all be a red herring.
Now, some of the techniques I discussed in my other Harry Potter video are
specific to prose but two of them: muting culprits and burying clues are just as useful in film. And
the story could have benefited by muting Credence. What I mean is Rowling has the tendency to make her culprits
totally invisible for the first three quarters of the story. Quirrell, Ginny and Peter, we barely hear a word from the
or about them until they're revealed to be important. Even with Barty Crouch
disguised as Mad-Eye Moody in The Goblet of Fire or with Snape in the Half-Blood Prince,
two characters who are much more active in their stories, Rowling found a way to divert our attention away from them with other
suspects. But in Fantastic Beasts, all of the evidence points to it being Credence. There aren't any other suspects with a comparable amount of
characterization and the visuals bias us against him from the beginning.
Even though he doesn't say all that much during the film, he still sticks out like a sore thumb.
There is also a
secondary mystery surrounding the identity of Grindelwald but it's not much of a plot twist when we learn that Agent Graves is
also Grindelwald. Savvy viewers will have noticed the
similarity between the shots used to introduce the two characters,
visually linking them together and this is a visual trick that I really like. The problem is that they come just a few minutes after
one another, making the second shot really noticeable when maybe it wouldn't have been like 20 minutes later. Even if you didn't catch that
Graves is just acting evil the whole time. These kinds of plot twists are effective when a good character is revealed to be a bad
character or vice-versa. But to reveal that a bad guy is really just another
bad guy – there's no twist on our
expectations here. Okay, so the mystery elements of the first film fail because they are too easily guessable. The mysteries in the sequel, however,
fail because they are totally unguessable. In that movie, there is an absurdly
convoluted backstory involving the characters of Leta Lestrange,
Credence and several others. But our characters barely get anywhere into solving all of this before we're hit with a giant
brick of expository dialogue at the end of the movie. It's a puzzle where we're given
90% of the pieces at the very end and then told the solution seconds later. And all of that is just a big tangent from
the real mystery concerning Credence's parents. Now that mystery is at least a fair game. There is a clue that points to the
solution that an audience member could
conceivably guess.
The problem there is that we get the answer to the mystery at the end of the film, but we have to wait until the
next movie to get the explanation for how on earth that solution works. So for entirely different reasons,
the mystery elements of both films feel unsatisfying.
Now, that in and of itself is not a damning
criticism. Mystery is just one element of these films and it's a far less important one than it was in the Harry Potter
films. Newt Scamander is not an investigator like Harry was. Harry was always
proactively attempting to solve half-a-dozen mysteries at once. While Newt doesn't want anything to do with any of this.
"Sorry about that. I do have things to do actually."
And this actually creates another problem in the structure of the film. The first film feels like it's being ripped in half by two
horses running in opposite directions. Half of the film wants to be a light-hearted
fantasy adventure about a wacky professor and his suitcase of magical creatures, and the other wants to be a dark
prologue to a wider social conflict centered around big mysteries. This leads to a lot of weird
structural choices in the screenplay since the two stories don't mesh together naturally. For instance, we don't find out what Newt's actual
motivation is in the story until thirty nine minutes into the film.
"He's the real reason I came to America."
"Bring Frank home."
This could have been solved if, for instance, we had a first act set before Newt comes to America and the whole movie
could have been about him trying to set this creature free. But I suspect that wasn't really an option since there are a bunch of
plot lines with other characters that Rowling wanted to explore in America, meaning Newt had to start the film in what feels like the
break in to Act Two of a different movie. Where still his main goal in the story isn't
opposed by anyone else. It's not like there's, I don't know, someone who wants to kill the creature, or someone
who wants to capture it, or someone
who
wants to keep it as a pet rather than release it, and that's because all of the other characters are busy in the other plotline
involving the big mystery.
Newt himself doesn't even learn about the murder the Obscurial has committed until more than an hour into the story. I mean have you
ever seen a mystery film where the
quote unquote
detective doesn't learn that there is a mystery to be
solved until the midpoint of the film? This really ought to be way back at the inciting incident. So, we end up with a
fantasy adventure that keeps getting interrupted by a mystery plotline
dominated by other characters, instead of a mystery story that takes place within a fantasy setting, like Harry Potter was. There's a
little more of a narrative through line to Newt story in the sequel but it's buried under an endless list of subplots and tertiary
characters. Now, I'm not sure what needs to be done for this franchise to course-correct but given how
effective Rowling has been at telling mysteries in the past, I think these films could be greatly improved
if they focused once again on telling mystery stories where the main character is engaged with that mystery from the beginning. Where there are enough
alternative answers to the mystery to keep us guessing but that doesn't get lost in the weeds of world building and
backstory, which can make the solution to the mystery impossible for the audience to foresee.
So this episode was about a fantasy mystery series but looking back at my videos for the past six months or
so you may have noticed that
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a sci-fi writer who
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