What Happened to the Potterverse?
A franchise in search of a story.
like a listless 20-something who has moved home after college with no idea what to do next, the Fantastic Beasts series keeps seeking out the familiarity of high school. The Secrets of Dumbledore, the third and newest installment, is about nothing short of a skirmish for the soul of the wizarding world. And, still, we wind up at Hogwarts. The whole movie is dour-looking save for that turn: a honey-colored sequence that wanders through the Great Hall, visits the Room of Requirement, and offers a glimpse of a student whizzing by on a broom.
It’s viscous with a nostalgia that goes beyond fan service, as though the film itself were yearning to return to a simpler time—when its leads were played by carefully chosen unknowns and not trouble-prone stars; when its source material’s author was a fairy-tale success story rather than a villainous transphobe; and when it could hawk some cozy, magical British boarding-school details instead of devote all its focus on impending war with Wizard Hitler.
Or maybe all The Secrets of Dumbledore is yearning for is some structure and reason for being. Fantastic Beasts is in the middle of floundering through a planned five-film run it may never actually finish. The decision hinges on audience interest but may also be affected by the fact that no one involved in these movies seems to have any idea what their appeal is supposed to be. The Secrets of Dumbledore is, like the first two films, directed by David Yates and written by J.K. Rowling, this time with the help of Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves.
It’s slightly more coherent than 2018’s The Crimes of Grindelwald, which is saying something given that
its characters embark on missions they don’t understand in an effort to stymie the clairvoyance that Gellert Grindelwald (played by a game Mads Mikkelsen, taking over for a now radioactive Johnny Depp) bloodily obtains. But it’s woefully pleasure free from the first scene—in which Grindelwald’s underlings kill a rare animal called a qilin and steal its young—to the final showdown.
Eddie Redmayne, hunching his shoulders and exuding hesitancy as Newt Scamander, is still the nominal lead, but after spending two films with an unconventional hero, The Secrets of Dumbledore is champing at the bit to shift direction to a more standard one—like, for instance, the
dashing Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), who enters the forefront with an explanation for why he has been so committed to staying on the sidelines. In the process, he reveals himself to be gay (by way of some conveniently excisable dialogue) and a onetime wizard supremacist.
Fantastic Beasts, should it continue, is headed for an epic face-off of sorcerous exes. That should excite. Maybe it would if the films didn’t traffic in such murky digital effects and if Law and Mikkelsen shared something more than the sizzling chemistry of two colleagues exchanging pleasantries at a trade show.
Other characters include Alison Sudol as accidental Wizard Nazi Queenie Goldstein; a barely trying Ezra Miller— they’re still around, for now—as tragic magical plot device Credence Barebone; Josh Gad’s tethered Dan Fogler as token Muggle Jacob Kowalski; Victoria Yeates as Newt’s smitten assistant, Bunty Broadacre; William Nadylam as some guy; and Callum Turner as some other guy. Katherine Waterston has effectively been banished, with her character, Tina Goldstein, busy and therefore “not available” for more than an extended cameo. But Jessica Williams is around, and as Dumbledore ally and American charms professor Lally Hicks, she does a fun, if unsteady, approximation of a midAtlantic accent.
In this era of IP and readily mobilized fandoms, there’s talk about how much the power balance has shifted from individuals’ creative visions toward the audience’s desires. But Fantastic Beasts has the opposite problem. It’s the product of a lucrative fictional universe that no one seems to know how to build on but that feels the need to keep going anyway, a franchise in search of a story. If the series was conceived as a way to hold on to the fans of the original books and movies who are now grown, what’s clear is it’s a children’s story staggering to support a few ambitious and deeply underdeveloped themes.
The final act of The Secrets of Dumbledore involves a magical act of voter fraud, and the plot pivots on a disagreement about whether purveyors of hate should be given a platform so the public can decide whether to reject their ideas. Despite this, the film has no real desire to explore why its charismatic villain is able to rally adoring crowds to his side, a focus that would apparently be too dark—every follower of Grindelwald we do get a closer look at feels bad about their choices.
Neither bold enough to be provocative nor able to capture the appeal of the original films, Fantastic Beasts is stuck in limbo, having failed to grasp what should now be obvious: Adult devotees are far more likely to want to crawl back into childhood comfort than to see the wizarding world struggle to reflect the real one.