For those who don’t care, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) is another in the prequel universe of Harry Potter. In this well executed, visually stunning iteration, Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) enlist the help of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and a trusted coven of wizards and witches, to thwart the continued plans of Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen), who intends to start a war with Muggles. The timeframe and plot invoke the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Concerns about bloodlines and racial purity underpin Grindelwald‘s intentions. Themes that continue into the Potter stories. This film resolves itself adequately, with enough loose ends to guarantee yet another in the franchise.
There is one thing that disconcerts me. In the original Potter films, made in the naughties, Dumbledore is an old man, long white hair, trailing beard, the quintessential wizard. In Fantastic Beasts, set in the 1930s, he’s a dashing gent in his late forties, who is at least three hundred years old. Seventy years later Dumbledore looks like someone in the twilight of his life, when he should be a wizard in late middle age. I’m probably missing something, already there in the other films, but it feel like an inconsistency that needs explaining.
Darrin // Nightingale 