CAN I JUST CALMLY POINT OUT THAT THE ELDER WAND DOESN'T NEED TO BE PRESENT FOR YOU TO WIN ITS ALLEGIANCE.

TWO WORDS. DRACO. MALFOY.

 

CleanRag:

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The speedy execution was on the orders of Grindlewald. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the legitimate government officials might not be so quick to do it, even if you could reasonably argue that they should.

 

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Also it's possible that Grindelwald's escape occurs very quickly, before they can get him to the execution chamber.

 

Saw the movie yesterday, it was okay. Liked it but didn't love it.

Good stuff:

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-the magical beasts themselves and the scenes that were all about capturing them. The movie was at its strongest when it was about Newt and Jacob wrangling with them.

-magic in general, the atmosphere and all. Showing us a natural legilimens and what that means for magic.

-Queenie and Jacob. Not really their "romance" but as individual characters. Likeable, fun and charming.

-the humor. Laughed quite a bit, especially during the niffler scenes (little bastard also stole my heart :3)

Meh stuff

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-Newt himself. We didn't really get a clear picture on who he is. Just that he loves magical beasts and is a decent person. Would have liked some more insight. He was not terrible or anything, just wasn't that memorable either.

-Still not sure how to feel about that Obscurus bit. it's interesting on one hand, just not sure how well it fits into the HP world in general and this movie especially. Would have preferred if the movie focused on just the magical beasts.

-Too much apparating in the final fight, made it feel like it was an X-Men movie at times. It never stuck to me as a combat tool, that one could teleport like Nightcrawler because the splinching danger would prevent it. Maybe ana amazing wizard/witch could do, but if Newt can, how hard can it be? Also lack of the loud noise that is supposed to come with that. It wasn't terrible or anything but a bit distracting for me.

Bad stuff

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-Grindelwald reveal. Really wish they hadn't included that. Or if this movie was supposed to be a set-up for Grindelwald, that they would have done something else entirely with him.

-Tina was a character I couldn't get into at all.

-either one of the romances. They both felt forced, both were shoehorned in because big movies like this need a romantic element they can't be bothered to organically develop. Although I will say, there was a lot more chemistry between Jacob and Queenie than there was between Tina and Newt. Dunno, just rolled my eyes whenever a "moment" was set up, especially at the end.

Overall, solid movie, 6.5-7/10. Did enjoy my time in the theater.

 

Well, it was certainly a novel experience, going to a Harry Potter movie and not already knowing pretty much everything that was going to happen.

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One of the best ways to hide something is to have some raving lunatic screaming at the public about it.

Ranting about witches in 1920s NYC is like ranting, today, about alien abductions... or how the royals and major heads of state are friggin' lizard people. Who's going to believe that?

It's when you silence the squawking or make the conspiracy theorist disappear that the average citizen sits up and takes notice. 'If someone took them out, then maybe what they were saying had weight to it...'

It's similar to how killing someone can turn them into a martyr, at which point one person's cause becomes many people's crusade.

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It's clearly Rowling expanding on Ariana Dumbledore's backstory.

In fact, the whole reason Grindelwald was looking for an Obscurial was obviously because he had already met one -Ariana- and knew how powerfully destructive they could be. She did accidentally kill her mother, after all.

I think the people dissing the Obscurial plot are forgetting just how pivotal obscurials are to Grindelwald's past. If it hadn't been for Ariana's death, Gellert might very well have had Dumbledore at his side... at least for a while. Instead, he lost his friend and got the idea for a possible new super weapon.

And nothing is as terrible as Cursed Child; it reads exactly like bad fan fiction. Whenever I hear something good about it, it's just someone all starry-eyed over the special effects in the play; they never seem to mention anything about the plot. Sheesh, go see a professional illusionist, then. Outside of that, it's just talk of plotholes, direct contradictions to canon, and blatant fucking with the happy ending of the books, whether you agree with the pairings or not.

Note, even in that little interview with David Heyman, when they asked him about the play and if he liked it, he only mentioned the on-stage special effects (aside from "I love Scorpius," *retch*). That could have been him not thinking past what wowed him, like those other people, but I think it was actually a very politically-minded dodge, so he could praise the play while never actually praising its plot, casting, acting, dialogue...

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What I want to know is what he did with the real Graves. There had to be one.

The notion Gellert spent enough time in the U.S. to make up the Graves identity out of whole cloth and get into a high-ranking governmental position, while simultaneously waging a war in Europe, strains credulity past the breaking point.

He had to have been posing as an existing person.

Just for the record, Newt using Finite Incantatem to unmask him eliminates Polyjuice and Metamorphmagus as possibilities, unless the movies take a "Cursed Child" sized cricket bat to canon. I only mention it because the speculation I've seen irritates me.

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Perhaps Tina's terror, when she found out she and Newt were to be immediately executed, was intense enough to broadcast her thoughts more strongly, allowing them to be picked up by any sensitive/talented enough Legilimens in the area. Meh.

What bugs me about Queenie's character is that she's constantly reading other people's thoughts, even after they tell her in no uncertain terms to knock it off. It is a flagrant violation of privacy on an unimaginably personal level.

That could have been ameliorated by a simple little addition that wouldn't have taken less than a minute to explain.

We already know Legilimency is a rare skill, and we only see it being used by the most accomplished wizards in the original novels. So, if Queenie is so skilled at Legilimency, why is she stuck slinging coffee at MACUSA, instead of having a better paying job, like an investigator?

Our only two options are that...
1: She can't control it. This puts her on par with other 'broken' Harry Potter characters, like the Obscurials, so it's not new ground. Fair enough. It would probably be hard to get a better job in the government, if you were known to have a magical disability... particularly one that puts government secrets at risk every time one of your superiors is within spitting distance of you. It also makes her invasions of privacy infinitely more excusable, though her rudeness at discussing everything she discovers is still a problem.

2: She can control it but she's an unthinkably rude and disrespectful asshole who willfully invades the minds of everyone she encounters, not caring a whit about their privacy, feelings, or insistence that she stop it. She's stuck with a shit job because everyone knows what she does (she's not exactly keeping it a secret) and knows she cannot be trusted around anyone who bears important government secrets.

Personally, I'd have preferred option 1. Thirty seconds to add to the dinner scene...

Queenie: "Sorry, I've always had a knack for it but I have a hard time controlling it. It sure makes it hard getting a job doing anything more important than serving coffee. Who wants to hire you when they know none of their secrets are safe around you? Oh, so the trick to your grandmother's pastry recipe is to use ice water when you mix the dough?"

Jacob: "Yeah, she always- Hey!"

I guess it's a good thing, for the plot, that Queenie never spent much time around Graves; that would have made for a short run-time...

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Because roaring 20s flapper culture.

It's a rich vein to tap, and completely wasted if the movie takes place in America's west. Besides, much of the plot revolves around wizards being in close contact with the muggle population. Unless you push it all the way out to the west coast, you lose that the minute you move the story out west, to Arizona, in the early twentieth century.

Answered above.

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A: As you said, "Depp's Grindelwald" was on screen for 10 seconds in a Harry Potter film. He'd have to be a miracle worker to turn in an 'impressive' performance under those conditions.

B: Boba Fett was a bounty hunter we were told was impressive, but the only time we saw him in action was when he got killed by slapstick comedy.

Darth Maul was an impressively skilled character who died with little screen time.

Captain Phasma was a character people were disappointed got zero screen time, after they unjustifiably got a mega-hype hard-on for her because she was a unique female Storm Trooper in chrome armor, played by a Game of Thrones actress. (And the fans' disappointment is really mostly their own fault, in this case.)

None of those have anything in common with Graves, who was a menacing government official who proved to be a skilled combatant, before being unmasked as Grindelwald... which only happened after he was essentially shot in the back while taking on the bulk of NYC's top aurors, single-handed.

You can complain Graves turned out to be Grindelwald instead of a top Grindelwald enforcer and a recurring character in his own right, and I can definitely sympathize with that sentiment, but you can't really compare your Star Wars apples to these oranges.

Though I may be nitpicking your choice of comparisons.

The torch singer is probably a goblin, given that Gnarlack is supposed to be one, too... as much as that annoys me.

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I had originally been under the impression that Gnarlack was a pukwudgie.

He looks completely different from the established goblins: Skin tone, facial structure, height(?), fingers that are bent back on themselves! And he's CG instead of a little person in makeup (though I suppose that's the only way you're going to get Ron Perlman to pass for a short HP goblin). Other than being a rude, opportunistic, backstabber, he's a complete departure from the HP movie goblins.

To say nothing of the speakeasy's torch singer. I mean, her anatomy is even less like the goblins we saw in the other movies than Gnarlack's is (if they're both goblins... wow, talk about sexual dimorphism). Buuut, the posters say he's a goblin. Oh well... whatever.

I still say the singer is a pukwudgie, because I'm a stubborn bitch.

Things that amused me:
Apparently JKR decided to dig the name Queenie out of her old class list (it was originally Daphne's), for use in this movie. Or did Tina's sister get a mention somewhere prior to this?

FYI, Giggle Water was actually real-world slang for booze, at one time. Likewise, 'blind pig' was just another name for a speakeasy.

Magical U.S. apparently had color-coded threat levels several decades before the muggles adopted the system.

Things that irritated me:
Queenie's flagrant abuse of her... talent.

Maybe Tina should have been named Weeping Willow, to go with Moaning Myrtle. As has been mentioned in this thread, she almost constantly looks to be on the verge of tears. Weird.

Accent or no accent, every other line Redmayne speaks in this movie sounds like he's talking with a wet sock stuffed in his mouth. I strongly suspect he was trying to talk around the cock that he had removed in The Danish Girl.

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The nundu. What the fucking fuck. They're supposed to look like jaguars, be roughly the size of a bus, breath disease on a whim, and can't be taken down by fewer than a hundred wizards... but we're supposed to believe that the moderately-sized, not jaguar-like, feline with the pufferfish throat, that Newt has basically roaming free in his suitcase, is a nundu? We're supposed to believe that gawky, Ichabod-as-fuck, Asperger's sufferer managed to subdue a live nundu and just has it behind a curtain in his valise?

Fuck whoever is responsible for that. I call bullshit.

If that was a nundu, never even mind how it got in there, Jacob takes one look at it, Newt tells him it's a baby because an adult is big enough that cub scout troops could hold meetings in its stomach, and then it gets pissy and breathes a cloud of fuckyouandyouruglymomma on Jacob. Newt manages to stumble out of the suitcase, dragging an incapacitated Jacob with him, even though it would be easier to levitate him, but Newt's wand is primarily used for distracting primates so fuck it, and Jacob dies on the sidewalk, spreading five kinds of rare plague to the muggle onlookers. Roll credits as the population of New York City is reduced by eighty percent.


JKR releases all this info about America's magic school and magical creatures, but the only one in the movie is the Thunderbird? Yeah, I'll just pretend Gnarlack and his torch singer were pukwudgies, and the nundu was a wampus with a really bad rash. I'm just frustrated we're getting bad interpretations and unnecessary redesigns of old creatures, when JKR just tossed out a new batch of ones to utilize.

A thing I noted:

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The color-coded terror alert, the way the aurors just straight up blasted Credence, and the MACUSA's method of execution all seem very specifically chosen to invoke the real life US law enforcement system... and not exactly in a positive way.

• They were looking for the wrong magical WMD.
• At least Credence wasn't black: I guess they had the good sense not to mess with that can of worms.
• The chair in the middle of the execution chamber seems very unnecessary... until you realize it's meant to invoke thoughts of "The Chair."

Overall, I enjoyed Fantastic Breasts and How to Bind Them, when I could decipher Redmayne's shoe-gazing mumblings, and the film wasn't busy contradicting itself or canon.

 

Maybe I'm wrong, but I assumed that Gnarlack and the singer were human-goblin hybrids. We know that Hagrid's dad apparently fucked a giant. Stranger things have happened [in the wizarding world].

 

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Yeah, when watching the movie I assumed Grindelwald's execution order for Newt and Tina was massively illegal, but he figured nobody would kick up a fuss before his plans came to fruition.

 

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I'd go one step further and suggest that he's got several people on the inside, not unlike Voldemort and the British ministry. Or maybe they're Imperio-d, take your pick. Either way, they'd be the ones who'd carry out the quick and dirty executions and possibly be the ones who'd spring Grindelwald out before he can be executed (or even tried).

I find it amusing though that the American system seems to be just as bad as the British one. So much for the hyper competent portrayal it usual gets in fanon.

 

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Man, Depp as Grindelwald was spectacularly ill cast. Reverse balding and that retarded moustache were horrendous, and they wasted a perfectly good character in Graves.

Also, where was the fucking magic? I could count on one hand the amount of times someone spoke the incantation to a spell.

The magical battles were very poorly shot and directed, to the point where it was hard to have any emotional reaction towards them as a result. It was just "oh hey now we're shooting shitty splashes of light at one another that blow you back and do fuck all else." There was none of Dumbledore or Voldemort's majesty or creativity in Grindelwald's spell use. I still vividly remember the scene in the 2nd Deathly Hallows movie where Voldemort's robes fly out and attack all around him. It was a frightening, evocative scene that clearly demonstrated just how big a gulf there was between Voldemort and everyone else, and showed why he was feared. Same with the battle in the ministry in OOTP.

Here? Grindelwald used the same spells as everyone else, with the exception of that halfassed wimpy force lightning spell that went on forever and did nothing to Newt. Sure, he shielded himself against thirty aurors. Which is impressive, I guess, but pretty boring visually and doesn't effectively communicate any of his strengths.

We'll see how Depp does I guess, but I'm not expecting much.


And everything about Queenie was just awful. Redmayne was good though, as were the magical beasts. Funny too, the Niffler was the best part of the movie by far.

Overall 4/10. Funny, but the shitty magic really brought it down for me, and I don't think it was well directed, shot, or plotted. The music was pretty underwhelming too.

 

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You must have missed that bit. She states in the movie that she can't control it.

 

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So it was polyjuice, there was real Graves and we probably won't learn what happened to him. Also Newt used Revelio, not Finite Incantatem.

 

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I saw this as a retcon or an error on the movie's part, but technically it is possible that Specialis Revelio can revert the effects of Polyjuice. All six instances of its use in the books failed, meaning it might just be damn complicated. Given that JKR was the one to write the script, we could probably lean towards it being possible. She did have help in the script writing process however, so there is that ambiguity.

 

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He used Revelio (reveal hidden things), not Specialis Revelio (reveal spells on this object). This spell previously only appeared in games and in opening of Japanese Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

 

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Well, my memory is shit, so I'm not too surprised at having failed to remember that after one viewing. Although, I did look it up elsewhere online to be sure, so I guess I'm not the only one with a shite memory.

Either way, I don't know why anyone bothers brewing Polyjuice if all it takes to defeat it is a Revelio. Nearly a month to brew the stuff, and if the person you're trying to fool is even the least bit paranoid, they can check you at the door with a Revelio, and you're irrevocably fucked.

If he was using Polyjuice, then as far as I'm concerned it's another example of the movie makers fucking up the magic aspect of their magic-based movie... or more after the fact meddling by JKR, with shit that would be better off left alone. She never met a mathematical inconsistency or plot-hole that she didn't fall right into, and they multiply every time she revisits the canon.

You would think she, of all people, wouldn't need to be reminded about this stuff. Internal consistency! Why would people spend weeks brewing a complex potion with hard to acquire or prohibitively expensive components, if it could be defeated with an off the cuff spell?

And, shit, the movies make the potion even more lame, since it doesn't change your voice! Or has that changed now, too?

The people of the Wizarding World get more and more stupid every time she picks up a pen. Dammit, JKR, I just want to love the world you created; why do you have to keep making it so fucking difficult!
:yandere

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At the time, I was given the impression "can't control it" was more like "I just can't help eating this whole bag of chips!" as opposed to "I can't help what I say because I have Tourette syndrome."

But I could have been wrong.

Until I buy the movie or they sell the novelization, I won't have much of this movie actually committed to memory.

 

You can already purchase the script in book format. Pretty sweet cover art.

 

Yeah, I happened to be out yesterday, saw the book, and said, "Wasn't I just talking about this?"

There's a niffler under that cover.

I may pick it up eventually, though I think I'd prefer if they made a novelization, rather than simply publishing the screenplay. The issue there is probably that JKR is doing other stuff... and we're probably better off with the script than we would be with someone else doing a novelization.

'Course I was out replacing my TV, since it just died, so I'll probably be waiting until I actually have... you know, money, to get the book.

 

So, I finally watched it yesterday, without having checked this thread beforehand and without watching any spoilers and without reading any reviews.

I generally enjoyed it, but damn, that mustache is a disgrace to German mustaches everywhere.

 

Oh, German mustaches? Really?

 

I watched the movie with my little nephew. After the movie was over I got him his very first Harry Potter book. He does not know how to read yet, he's 6, but he promised me to finish it as soon as he learn how to read. So i'm a proud uncle now.
The movie was good by the way, a very solid start for the franchise, better than SW:FA imo.

 

I also watched it with a six year old who subsequently wanted me to read him the Harry Potter books, something I have not done in years. I am excited to finally have an excuse