Watched the U. S.A.'s 2022 Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2:22:08), the third and apparently last of a projected five-movie series. In this movie, Albus Dumbledore seeks to prevent his former lover, Gellert Grindelwald, from dishonestly winning an election and taking control of the wizarding and non-wizarding worlds. In order to succeed, he enlists the assistance of magical allies: brothers Theseus and Newton Scamander, Queenie Goldstein, Jacob Kowalski, Professor Tally Hicks. Bunty Broadacre, and Yusuf Kama.
The movie earned bad reviews and is described as a commercial flop, so much so that a stop has been put to Installments 4 and 5. Looking closely, though, The Secrets of Dumbledore isn't as bad as the critics make it out to be. The story is well-told, well-directed, and well-performed, with, as usual, breathtaking magic.
What the critics couldn't pinpoint, perhaps, is that the audiences simply got tired of this kind of movie. J.K. Rowling's creative writing is flawed in many ways. Her blind spots are over-exposition, over-interpolation, and overpopulation, as though her secret objective is to create a mythology that rivals no less than that of the ancient Greeks. As a result, her endings are overextended, mawkish, and melodramatic, necessitating closure for at least seven characters, which gets tedious and predictably boring. Her greatest sin of commission, however, is using magic as a mere deus ex machina to rescue her characters out of dire situations--all they have to do is whip out their wands and those spectacular visuals appear, after which they smugly pat themselves on the back. No character, therefore, relies on his or her own, genuine intelligence, common sense, cleverness, and wisdom to solve their problems and comes across as a true protagonist, if not a hero and a heroine. While this trick worked with her first series, it was because her characters there were children. The same formula simply does not work with adult characters who must manifest, at the very least, maturity and that sine qua non of authentic magic: spirituality.
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