COVID- 19 created many problems for the film industry and it is very obvious which movies were made during the pandemic; “Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore” is one of those movies.
The film faced more struggles than just the pandemic. After the scandal with Johnny Depp and his estranged wife, Amber Heard, the character of Grindelwald was recast in November of 2020 and the role was given to Mads Mikkelsen.
The highly anticipated film disappointed many viewers and has received a 47% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The rating may seem a little harsh but it is well deserved. Half of the 2h 22m film was not important to the plot and the climax of the film was more than predictable. There were also several new characters in this installment of Fantastic Beasts and viewers barely had any introduction or time to learn their names. The cinematography was subpar as well. The whole first part of the movie was very hard to see because everything was so dark. Even when the film’s setting moved from night to day, it was still hard to see details on screen.
For a film that’s a small piece of a large franchise, audience members did not need a lot of background information. The tense relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald is obvious from the beginning as well as Grindelwald’s fight against the muggles. Even though the driving factors of the plot were obvious, many aspects of it seemed rushed. There was a new type of spell that wasn’t explained and there was some new information about the wizard government that audience members were unfamiliar with.
Secrets of Dumbledore had a lot of potential but it fell short due to all of the detrimental factors. The pandemic widely affected the conditions in which the movie was filmed. Even though the production company was rushing to get the film out on the big screen, they could’ve approached the film differently than trying to shove a bunch of unconnected things into one plot.
