Jack of Harts

I watched Crimes of Grindelwald this weekend, making it my first movie in a while. I will say off the bat that it is a different beast from the first movie, and feels very much like the middle act in a trilogy. Fantastic Beasts is basically a monster hunter movie with a twist that introduces us to the new hero, and gives us a glimpse into the big bad and many of the supporting characters. It is a very good stand-alone film.

Crimes of Grindelwald is not a stand-alone film at all. It takes the characters we already know from the first movie, and gives them a bigger story to play in. It is a story about the future of the world as we know it and what the wizards will do about it. And it is a true prequel lead-in to the Harry Potter stories. We meet numerous characters and names we recognize from Harry Potter, and it really feels to me like Grindelwald is putting together the movement that Voldemort leads in Harry Potter’s time.

Fantastic Beasts is a movie you can watch without ever seeing any Harry Potter film. It’s just a fun movie set in the 1920s with wizards and fantastic beasts in it. Crimes of Grindelwald I think is a foundational movie of the franchise that will help show how the world Harry Potter grew up in came to be. It’s also just plain a fun movie to watch. It’s more serious, has fewer fantastic hi-jinks in it, and is a much more adult story than the first. It feels much more like the last Harry Potter film in a lot of good ways.

I enjoyed it, and I think most fans of Harry Potter will enjoy it. I give it two fantastic artifact-snatching grubby little paws way up.