MASSIVE 2019 PREVIEW The biggest sci-fi and fantasy of next year!
308
116
reasons 2019 will be legendary!
f eat u ri n g
•GOOD OMENS •STAR TREK: DISCOVERY •X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX
star wars l ands on T V !
mandalorian the
all you need to know about the hottest new show in the galaxy
plus! GAME OF THRONES • THE ORVILLE • STAR WARS IX • captain marvel AVENGERS 4 • SHAZAM! • TERMINATOR • glass • STRANGER THINGS • MORE!
Red Alert Jan 2019
sci-fact!
Subscribe at myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/sfx
SPECTRE warbler Sam Smith will follow in Art Garfunkel’s footsteps by singing the new Watership Down theme.
director exclusive
rabbit forming
Director Noam Murro takes us down the rabbit hole of his all-star Watership Down reboot “I didn’t see Watership Down as a child so I didn’t have the opportunity to be shellshocked by it. I guess I’m the anomaly,” laughs Noam Murro, director of this month’s glossy animated revisit of Richard Adams’ seminal children’s book. This joint Christmas present from the BBC and Netflix marks the first major retelling of Adams’ politically charged tale of rabbits seeking solace amid the perils of man and nature. It follows Martin Rosen’s notoriously bloody and haunting 1978 edition, which featured the voices of John Hurt and Richard Briers. Cut to 2018 and James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, Rosamund Pike and Sir Ben Kingsley are among the impressive line-up of talent leading Murro’s new four-episode series. Impressive – but it was an easy sell for all involved. “Everyone who participated had an incredible understanding of the material, its importance and their relationship as children, adults and as British to this text,” Murrow tells Red Alert a few weeks before the show’s Christmas debut. “James was the first to be approached and when he received the script he was wearing an old Watership Down t-shirt. He’d studied it and had a very profound understanding of the story.” Joining rabbit leader Fiver (McAvoy) and his clairvoyant brother Hazel (Hoult) in their warren-on-therun is an ensemble cast that includes Olivia Colman, Daniel Kaluuya and Peter Capaldi. However those still scarred by Rosen’s previous incarnation beware: Murro isn’t shying away from the darker side of this rabbit tale. “The idea was always to be true to the book and do violence in a way that’s part of life,” the director says of the story’s bloodier moments.
12 | sfx magazine | january 2019
Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig and co are all back for this remake. “I think that’s the beauty of Watership Down: it deals in a responsible way with violence and doesn’t negate it. The world is tough and we all face hardship – we just had to do it in a responsible way.” This respectful tone is mirrored in the film’s elegantly animated aesthetics, which Murro explains were inspired by a very grounded source. “I was in New York’s Museum of Natural History and walked into the diorama room,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow – I don’t think that’s been done before,’ where you use the diorama feel. There was a very hard rule when we were making Watership Down that we weren’t going to put the camera where it couldn’t be in real life. If I couldn’t shoot it in live action, I wouldn’t be doing it in animation.”
h a r e A N D N OW This mature look and sense of responsibility for Adams’ work sets the scene for some festive viewing that’ll do a bit more than keep us entertained after we’ve scoffed too much Christmas cake – Murro hopes to get us
We’re hoping these bunnies are made of chocolate.
Red Alert Jan 2019
author exclusive
aerial assault SCI-FI TV ROUND UP
Watership Down will air on BBC One over Christmas in the UK, and will stream on Netflix internationally.
don’t quote me
“When I began, I didn’t know what the hell I had. I thought it might be a short story.” Twenty-eight years later, George RR Martin is still working on A Song Of Ice And Fire…
getty (1)
thinking, too. “The basic story – which for me has always been a post-war dystopian novel in the same vein as George Orwell’s Animal Farm – is universal and timeless,” he suggests. “The ideas of home, migration, who we are, how we describe ourselves as a society and who is leading whom – all these questions are at the heart of this wonderful story and are still relevant. I think if you open the news today, you’ll understand why we’re making this series again.” SBl
BBC confirms rumours that there’ll be no Doctor Who Christmas special for the first time since 2005 – though the TARDIS will materialise on New Year’s Day. Terry Pratchett adaptation The Watch gets series order from BBC America. New Disney+ streaming service developing Star Wars series featuring Rogue One’s Cassian Andor... …and an MCU show featuring Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Game Of Thrones’ final season will air in April, HBO confirms. Greg Kinnear to star in modernday take on The War Of The Worlds from Misfits writer Howard Overman. Andrew Lincoln may have left The Walking Dead, but Rick Grimes will return in three spin-off movies. Being Human creator Toby Whithouse will write the Neil Gaiman-produced Gormenghast. Grant Morrison developing his The Invisibles comic series for TV.
captain’s coming
Alastair Reynolds tells us why he’s never yet written a space opera
Whatever you do, don’t call Alastair Reynolds’ Shadow Captain a YA novel. “That kind of crept into the marketing at some point,” he says of Revenger, the first volume in this space-pirate trilogy. “I wanted to write a book that you could read if you were 15 or 16, but I didn’t consciously write down to a particular audience. It has a young adult protagonist, but then so does Dune.” What we can say is that, picking up the tale of the spacefaring Ness sisters, it’s a rollicking adventure that offers clues about the nature of “some big, underlying mysteries” that underpin the solar system. “I had a blast,” says Reynolds. “I got really into that high-Victorian adventure mode that I was hoping to hit.” This gives the book a different vibe to the cyberpunk-tinged hard SF of his Revelation Space sequence, but Reynolds says he’s long been drawn to steampunk, which he first encountered as a boy via Doctor Who adventure “The Talons Of Weng-Chiang” and Saturday afternoon movies. He says, however, he’s yet to write a space opera. Really? Yes, because he defines space opera as referring to a standalone volume with “lots of characters, colour and sweep”. He lays down the law further: “There has to be a lot at stake, and it really has to be about the rise and fall of galactic civilisation.” JWr Shadow Captain is published on 10 January. january 2019 | sfx magazine |
13
As the Star Wars universe suits up for The Mandalorian , Richard Edwards unleashes the Bothan spies to find the key intel on the hottest new TV show of 2019... 30 | sfx magazine | january 2019
the ultimate 2019 preview tv
he Force Awakens feels a long time ago… and not just because it takes place in a galaxy far, far away. It marked such a triumphant return to the universe George Lucas built that it briefly felt like the Disney incarnation of Lucasfilm could do no wrong – either critically or commercially. Then The Last Jedi arrived last December and split the fanbase like a lightsaber through Darth Maul’s midriff. Things got even less rosy when Solo did the unthinkable in May – it became the first live-action Star Wars movie to flop at the box office, making less than half of Rogue One’s take, and a mere 20% of The Force Awakens’. Even Disney CEO Bob Iger came to believe the world wasn’t quite ready for a new Star Wars film every 12 months.... “I made the timing decision, and as I look back, I think the mistake that I made — I take the blame — was a little too much, too fast,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in September. “I think we’re going to be a little bit more careful about volume and timing.” So while we can expect a pullback on the movies (though it’s full speed ahead on Episode IX and Game Of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss’s mysterious new saga, the standalones appear to be permanently frozen in Carbonite), a live-action TV series feels like enticingly unexplored territory. It’s also going to be one of the flagship shows on the new Disney+ streaming service (like Marvel’s proposed Winter Soldier/Falcon spin-off ), so, y’know, there’s quite a lot of pressure on them to get this right. Here’s everything we know so far...
january 2019 | sfx magazine |
31
They call it appointment television for a reason... Here’s the definitive guide to 2019 on the small screen the
u lt i m at e
preview 34 | sfx magazine | january 2019
Words: Tara Bennett, Ian Berriman, Simon Bland, Al Mannarino, Jayne Nelson, Paul Terry
In case you didn’t know, angels and demons have impeccable style.
the ultimate 2019 preview tv and
GOOD OMENS
Season 1 | US/UK Amazon Prime Video, first half of 2019
for ...
More must-see TV in 2019
Fans of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 novel Good Omens have long-lamented it was unfilmable due to its epic scope, diverse set-pieces and scale. Well we can all thank Pratchett’s posthumous letter to Gaiman asking him to finally undertake the adaptation for the fact that Good Omens is now an epic six-part series coming to Amazon. Showrun by Gaiman and directed by Douglas Mackinnon, the series relies on the dynamic between unlikely friends, the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and the demon, Crowley (David Tennant) preventing the end of the world. Gaiman says of the two actors’ fortuitous casting, “You get such a sense of who they are following their relationship over time, and realising how they become friends, and how it starts to define who they are and what they do, and how much they like each other. There are things you can make happen in filmmaking, and things that just happen and you are grateful for. With the chemistry of Michael and David, we didn’t know if it would happen, but they found their voices about 10 minutes in to the read-through and everyone said, ‘Oh, this is fun!’” TB/PT
The OA season 2 It’s taken forever to turn up – season one ended way back in December 2016 – but this fascinating and, yes, needlessly confusing show gets a welcome return.
Future Man season 2 The Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson plays a mild-mannered janitor who winds up trying to save the world through a computer game.
The Witcher new!
Kudos to Netflix for snapping up Henry Cavill to play monster hunter Geralt of Rivia, but we’re still not sure about his weirdo Legolas wig...
Noughts And Crosses new!
The BBC are fully behind Malorie Blackman these days: first came the Who episode “Rosa”, now there’s this adaptation of her dystopian young adult novel.
ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO Season 1 | US The CW, 15 Jan | UK TBC
The latest early ’00s sci-fi series getting revamped is Roswell, New Mexico. However, this version is only loosely based on the Roswell High books and Jason Katims’ TV adaptation. Showrunner Carina Adly MacKenzie admits to SFX that she came at the show with a strong aversion to just repeating what came before. “I was wrapping up my run on The Originals and they asked if I was interested in revamping Roswell. I said no because I didn’t want to do a teen supernatural romance. But [executive producer] Julie Plec said I should pitch the show I wanted to do so I made the [characters] all grown up. And the influences I was feeling at the time were politics, Twitter and a lot of murder podcasts and documentaries. So, I wanted to tell a small-town murder mystery, with aliens. [The CW] liked it so with this version, there are classic sci-fi ideas and we’re flipping them, so we’re looking at Body Snatchers, Stepford Wives and alien autopsies.” TB/AM
Lemony Snicket’s Series Of Unfortunate Events season 3
Season two of The OA promises more weird gooiness.
Neil Patrick Harris plays master of disguise Count Olaf for the last time as season three lands on Netflix in time for New Year’s Day.
Siren season 2 Fish-ladies walk on land in this silly yet watchable fantasy series. Year two’s tagline is the somewhat pointless “More mermaids are coming”.
Celebrating a new Neil Gaiman adaptation.
The Expanse season 4 Saved from death by Amazon (Jeff Bezos is a huge fan), showrunner Naren Shankar says this year will be a “bloodsoaked gold rush”.
Henry Cavill always wanted to be an elf.
january 2019 | sfx magazine |
35
The Orville
is back for a second voyage. Tara Bennett is oN board hen it was announced that Seth MacFarlane would be creating, writing and starring in his own contemporary take on Star Trek called The Orville, the news was met with raised eyebrows worthy of a Vulcan. Sure, MacFarlane was a self-confessed fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a massive space aficionado (he brought Cosmos back to TV in 2014), but was the dude who revelled in scatological humour really the one to bring episodic space exploration back to TV? As it turns out, yes, MacFarlane’s take was the exact one a lot of Trek fans were pining for. The Orville balanced its outlandish laughs with engaging and often earnest stories of exploration and adventure that were thoughtful and fun. Season one earned healthy ratings, eventual critical respect and a second season pick-up of 14 episodes. One of the executive producers helping MacFarlane chart the course of Captain Ed Mercer’s starship and crew is David A Goodman, who tells SFX that their follow-up season isn’t resting on its laurels. “We are sitting down, wracking our brains, trying to figure out, what are the things we want to talk about? How do we put it in a science fiction space? And what is it that we want to say? And then there’s the other aspect in the second season of exploring our characters, both the personal universe of the relationships between the characters that we’ve created, but then also the political
42 | sfx magazine | january 2019
and adventure universe that exists in the show as well.” Goodman says that having Star Trek: Discovery and Black Mirror as competition has upped storytelling standards on The Orville. “You don’t want to repeat,” he says. “You want to do something new, so the constraint is finding original ideas that haven’t been done, and doing them well. The freedom is that nobody has been doing this kind of science fiction as metaphor in an actionadventure drama format for a long time.”
s ta r t r e k k i n g As for where the story will pick up, Goodman points to the season one finale, which had Ed proposing a new romantic start to Kelly (Adrianne Palicki), who took a hard pass on his offer. Goodman teases, “We pick up almost
the ultimate 2019 preview tv
from there in that relationship. And we take it, I think, in a really interesting direction. We get to see those two actors, Adrianne and Seth, who embody those characters, really do some interesting, fun, compelling work as actors.” Goodman continues, “We see also Dr Claire Finn (Penny Johnson Jerald) has a great emotional arc this season. And with Bortus, we have a super-talented actor in Peter Macon who, with Chad Coleman who plays Klyden, are bringing an entire race and culture to life whenever you see them. I compare Peter, to some extent, to Leonard Nimoy, who, when he was on the original Star Trek, brought the entire Vulcan race to life. Peter’s doing the same thing, and he’s got Chad’s help. And their relationship is unlike anything you’ve seen anywhere on
The crew are back in town.
television. It’s so unique. It’s not a gay couple, which you have seen on television. It’s these aliens, and you’re going to get to see a lot more of that culture in the season. It’s really interesting.” And what’s a space series without aliens and new species? Goodman says season two really advances their storytelling in terms of how they use VFX and practical effects. “We’ve spent this season doing deep dives into the species that you’ve already met. And then, you’re going to see some great new stuff in terms of aliens and races. We learn a little bit more about Isaac (Mark Jackson). We’re seeing some more Moclans. The stories that we’ve come up with involving those species are really compelling and exciting. And then we meet some great new aliens that are both humanoid and non-humanoid.” There will also be a bevy of A-list guest stars that Goodman admits bowled him over. “I think the audience is going to be pretty happy, because there’s a lot of surprises casting wise this season. There are both live-action actors who are big names, and then there’s also a great voiceover guest star later in the season. It’s a fun season. I think it’s better than season one, because we built on it, and I hope the audience agrees with me.” The Orville is on Fox in the US from 30 Dec and Fox in the UK from 10 January. january 2019 | sfx magazine |
43
tardate: 6 October 2018. SFX is backstage at Madison Square Garden. Moments ago, cast members and producers of Star Trek: Discovery left the stage with the cheers of New York Comic Con attendees ringing in their ears. Now they’ve gathered in a catering room to explain how, after a debut season boasting breathtaking twists and turns, Star Trek’s newest iteration can shock and surprise all over again. Like the first run, season two will tell an ongoing story, focused on seven signals spread right across the galaxy and their connection to a mysterious winged figure dubbed the Red Angel. In Discovery’s command chair: Christopher Pike, James T Kirk’s predecessor as Enterprise captain. He’s played by Anson Mount, previously superhero patriarch Black Bolt in Inhumans. “They wanted somebody very much the opposite of [Jason Isaacs’s] Lorca,” Mount says of his more collaborative captain, before explaining how he drew on real life. “I’ve operated as a lead in a TV show before. When you go to acting school, the one thing they don’t teach you is that one day you’ll be on set and everybody’s going to turn and look at you, and you’ve got to have answers! I was thrown into the deep end of the pool of leadership in that job, and that helped me formulate this character.” Pike isn’t the only iconic figure joining the series. Season two finally introduces his science officer and Michael Burnham’s foster brother, Spock. Ethan Peck (grandson of Gregory) is the man sporting the pointy ears – and a rugged beard. When he recorded his audition tape, he had no idea he was playing a Vulcan. “The character on the page that I got would appear to be someone
46 | sfx magazine | january 2019
It’s a case of “do red lights spell danger?” in Star Trek: Discovery season two as Burnham’s brother rocks up. Ian Berriman quizzes the cast Young Spock doesn’t go in for shaving.
the ultimate 2019 preview tv
january 2019 | sfx magazine |
47
the ultimate 2019 preview movies
From a Marvel-ous climax to a Skywalking conclusion, Josh Winning picks the unmissable flicks burning up the screen in 2019
CAPTAIN MARVEL
8
mar
If the apocalypse comes, beep her
Welcome to 1995! Arriving just over a month before Avengers 4, this adventure set in the 1990s finally introduces Brie Larson as the titular spacehopper – lest we forget, the first Marvel female to headline her own movie. “She’s so sassy, she’s such a smartass, she won’t take shit from anyone,” says the film’s writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet of the character, an Air Force pilot who acquires superhuman abilities, gets caught up in a war between alien races, and teams up with a young Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson). Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Mississippi Grind), it’s been described as an “action comedy”. We’re ready to Marvel.
the
u lt i m at e
preview 52 | sfx magazine | january 2019
the ultimate 2019 preview movies
26
Will the Avengers finally be able to beat this big grape?
apr
Even more reasons to hit the cinema next year ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL 6 February
AVENGERS 4 This is the end... of the beginning?
Are you ready for the longest Marvel movie ever? Word has it the running time for the second half of Avengers: Infinity War is three hours – that’s 20 minutes longer than the previous team-up. Returning directors Joe and Anthony Russo are in the middle of editing, and have revealed that the film contains more than 3,000 VFX shots (surely most of them involving Groot), and while the plot’s as heavily guarded as Thanos’s glove, expect this to tie up those dangling Infinity War threads. “Will the stakes be higher in Avengers 4?” muses Joe Russo. “Absolutely. 100 per cent. The highest of any of the films to date, without question.”
Two decades in the making, James Cameron’s passion project finally hits screens, with Rosa Salazar mo-capping the titular cyborg hero.
So she’s called an angel, but where are her wings...?
BORDER 8 February This critically acclaimed Swedish fantasy has been selected as the country’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at next year’s Academy Awards.
HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U 15 February More nightmares for Theresa “Tree” Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) as she re-enters the time loop she thought she’d escaped from.
DUMBO 29 March Tim Burton directs this live-action remake of the animated Disney classic, reuniting him with actor Michael Keaton for the first time since 1991’s Batman Returns.
PET SEMATARY 5 April Stephen King’s novel gets a fresh adap courtesy of directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. Jason Clarke’s the dad haunted by the undead.
GLASS
Play it again, Sam... It’s been a long time coming, but the Unbreakable sequel (itself a Split spin-off ) is finally here. “When I made Unbreakable, I kind of intended to do three movies,” M Night Shyamalan explained of returning to the so-called “Eastrail 177” universe (named after the train that derails in Unbreakable), and he finally got his wish with Glass, which unites Bruce Willis’s indestructible hero David Dunn with James McAvoy’s dissociative superhuman Kevin and Samuel L Jackson’s genius villain Elijah Price, aka Mr Glass. In short: move over Marvel and DC, because things are about to get very interesting on the superhero circuit.
18 jan
Looks like 2019 is all about the purple villains.
HELLBOY 12 April
Honestly, we’re crying our eyes out already.
Stranger Things star David Harbour sees red in Neil Marshall’s R-rated reboot, fighting Milla Jovovich’s medieval Blood Queen.
CURSE OF LA LLORONA T BC A widowed social worker (Linda Cardellini) is targeted by a weeping ghost in Michael Chaves’ faith-based spooker.
january 2019 | sfx magazine |
53
spider-man: into the spider-verse
66 | sfx magazine | january 2019
spider-man: into the spider-verse
Sometimes just one webslinger isn’t enough... Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse
is an animation revolution, as Stephen Kelly discovers january 2019 | sfx magazine |
67
heroes & inspirations mark gatiss
72 | sfx magazine | january 2019
heroes & inspirations mark gatiss
mark gatiss
From unshakEable childhood dread to London’s oddest corners, the greatest living Englishman shares some of his favourite things with Nick Setchfield Portrait by Eivind Hansen
M getty (1)
ark Gatiss is the culmination of his passions. Volcanically so. “Like a spot!” he laughs, relishing the simile before giving it a gleeful squeeze. “Like a great big boil! All the pus has reached the bursting point in me!” Actor. Writer. Strangler. Gatiss’s Twitter bio omits the word enthusiast, possibly because it scarcely needs stating. From The League Of Gentlemen to Sherlock, his trilogy of Lucifer Box novels to acclaimed documentaries on painter John Minton and the history of screen horror, it’s a career powered by infatuations. “I’ve been lucky enough to pursue my passions,” he tells SFX as he chooses a mere seven of his touchstones ahead of Christmas ghost tale The Dead Room, which he’s written and directed for BBC Four. “The challenge always is that you don’t fall out of love with it, because it obviously becomes work. You have to do it when you don’t want to do it, and you don’t want to squash all the joy out of it, but I’ve not got there, thank god. “It all leaves a fingerprint, doesn’t it?”
THE TIME MACHINE (1960)
I saw it when I was very young and it completely knocked me for six. It’s amazing
the extent to which those early things grip you. As a writer you can’t write them out, either, no matter how many times you think, “Oh, I know where that’s come from!” They crop up again and again. There are so many elements of it which I can’t – and wouldn’t want to – dislodge from my head. The design of the time machine is so beautiful, it made my hair stand on end. The Morlocks terrified me so much, especially when he goes forward in time and it rots and its eyeball falls out! But the most crucial thing – and this is something that I keep coming back to – is the magical moment where he sits there, in his conservatory, pushes the lever and the sun and the moon arc overhead, and the
He hoped this was the correct lever for pink bubble bath.
fashions in the shop across the road change… I just love that. Magical. If you’re a Wells purist it’s obviously a very pulpy version of a brilliant novel that’s actually a devastating social critique, but as a piece of brilliant pop film culture there’s nothing like it. I could watch it for the rest of my life, and I fully intend to, starting right now!
THE GHOSTS OF MOTLEY HALL
It’s difficult to choose a TV show because there are so many things which once upon a time felt like buried treasure, and have now become much related and much anthologised, as it were. Because all of children’s TV was scary in those days and now because of wonderful things like Scarred For Life there’s no escape! There’s no hidden ones anymore. But a show I rediscovered – it must have been about eight years ago now – that was utterly delightful, and every bit as good as I remembered, was The Ghosts Of Motley Hall. I was ever so fond of that show and I bought the DVD with some trepidation, and I was terribly moved and delighted by it. Richard Carpenter, who wrote it, was a giant, much underrated. It’s a beautifully written show. It’s extremely melancholy, like all the best things. It has a sort of Bagpuss-like melancholy at its heart. And just a wonderful idea – a group of ghosts from january 2019 | sfx magazine |
73
Reviews cinema
FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD © 2018 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. Wizarding World™ Publishing Rights © J.K. Rowling WIZARDING WORLD and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Jude V Obscurial released OUT NOW!
12A | 134 minutes Director David Yates Cast Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Ezra Miller, Jude Law, Johnny Depp, Alison Sudol
JK Rowling’s Wizarding World is a remarkable accomplishment, up there with the MCU and the Star Wars galaxy in terms of imagination and mind-boggling complexity. So it’s almost a given that The Crimes Of Grindelwald is packed with spellbinding creatures, magical backdrops and clever Easter eggs that add plenty to the saga’s lore. The problem is that this second instalment of Rowling’s Potter prequel doesn’t really have a story to speak of. Instead it’s a bridging device, whose main function seems
She didn’t realise they were starring in a musical.
84 | sfx magazine | january 2019
to be setting up the third entry in a five-movie arc, rather better at world-building than narrative. It’s all downhill after an exhilarating airborne opening over New York, where the incarcerated Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) makes an audacious escape from wizard prison. It’s a giddy, vertiginous sequence that feels like the beginning of a rip-roaring adventure that – sadly – never arrives, as the pace slows to a plod. Indeed, you can’t help wishing that more of the visual effects budget had been directed towards set-pieces. Yes, the stunningly recreated 1920s Paris is every bit as spellbinding as NYC in the first Fantastic Beasts, but the film’s lacking in the sort of jaw-dropping action that any blockbuster needs. It’s also surprisingly light on genuine peril – certainly nothing
“Right, so where’s the Eiffel Tower?” that can’t be escaped by the quick flick of a wand. We know Grindelwald is bad news not so much because of anything he does as for what we’re told, with the “crimes” of the title very much off-screen misdemeanours. With Depp (whose casting has proved somewhat controversial among the fanbase) playing him more as charismatic populist politician than conventional Big Bad, there’s precious little hint of why he was the worst wizard of them all until Voldemort came along. The film functions better if viewed as a (very) talky character
It’s all downhill after the airborne opening piece, albeit one that has way too many important roles jostling for screen time: Nagini, the woman cursed to one day become Voldemort’s snake familiar, is painfully underused, as is Newt Scamander’s Auror brother Theseus; Ezra Miller, meanwhile,
9000
Reviews mind
probe
EZRA MILLER Credence Barebone in The Crimes Of Grindelwald
How would you describe Credence’s relationship with Nagini? It’s complicated and multifaceted. These are two human beings who do not really have any other human beings who they even remotely trust, so the fact that they’ve found that in each other is something special. They feel protective of each other in different ways. And there’s commonalities between what we’re going through in terms of our magical afflictions.
does the best he can, what with Obscurial Credence being as much McGuffin as man. This time out, Newt (Eddie Redmayne, still playing the part as a set of nervous tics rather than an actual character) is dispatched to Paris to find Grindelwald and Credence, which conveniently allows him to team up once more with American Auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston). Tina’s mind-reading sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) is also in Europe with her Muggle boyfriend Jacob (Dan Fogler), while Newt’s old school friend Leta Lestrange
becomes one point on a possible love triangle with the Scamanders. Played by Zoë Kravitz, Leta’s one of the two standouts in the movie, a complex, nuanced character struggling with a dark past and impossible-to-fathom motives. The other is Jude Law, who makes the role of the young Albus Dumbledore his own. If the older Dumbledore was at times an all-knowing Yoda cipher, this incarnation is a wizard at the height of his powers, whose intriguing history with Grindelwald feels like it could become the story’s driving force.
But even that’s subservient to the apparent main goal: revelations about the wider wizarding world. To be fair, Rowling has always been good at making exposition and infodumps riveting, and the final act’s bombshells are big enough to change the way you view the Potter stories. It also sets up plenty of questions for Fantastic Beasts 3 and beyond – now all Rowling needs to do is come up with a decent story. Richard Edwards Nagini’s name is inspired by the Naga, snake-like creatures from Indonesian mythology – some are half human.
How do they feel about the non-magical world? I think our characters just don’t mess with any of it. We’ve been betrayed by both – repeatedly. I don’t think they have any reason to trust wizards, witches, muggles, anybody. They’ve only been survivors of abuse and exploitation at every turn. Do you think Paris gives this one a different vibe? We know very little about magical France from the Harry Potter series. We just know about the Veela and Beauxbatons. We don’t even know yet that wands are called “baguette magique”, which I only knew because we were in magical Paris, and there was this “baguette magique” shop, and I was like, “I want one of those! It sounds delicious!” Richard Edwards
january 2019 | sfx magazine |
85