I finally made it back out of the house to see a movie. I wish I’d enjoyed the movie more.

Fantastic Crimes of Beastly Grindelwald or Something Like That suffers from some altogether too common pop-cinema ailments. Unmotivated action, Flanderization, and tokenism top my list, but I should also point out that it felt long and by the end I didn’t really care what happened to key characters, and those are more likely to dampen the spirits of movie-goers.

Unmotivated action is pretty easy to understand. It’s when you don’t think a character would do a thing, and the story never gets around to explaining why the character did the thing.

Flanderization is when a character in a series begins as a well-rounded, interesting person with quirks, but as the series progresses they are defined only by their quirks. It gets its name from Ned Flanders of Simpsons fame. Fantastic Beast’s Queenie Goldstein captivated us in the first film with her mind-reading, her smarts, her cooking, her effortless beauty, her kindness, and yes, being a little ditzy. This film mostly just gave us ditzy. It was pretty disappointing.

Tokenism is when a demographic is represented by only one character in the film, and it’s made worse when that character falls into one or more negative stereotypes. The only Asian woman in the film, Nagini, played by Claudia Kim (you may remember her as Doctor Helen Cho from Age of Ultron) happens to be cursed to turn into a giant serpent. Because serpent-ness is an Asian thing?

The good news is that everyone on screen did brilliantly with what they were given. Even when they weren’t given very much, they acted it to the nines, and did everything they could to make it work.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald doesn’t quite fall past my Threshold of Disappointment because I wasn’t expecting much. It doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, however, which leaves it in far too ordinary a place for something with “fantastic” right in the title.

Ant Man and The Wasp is set just prior to the events of Avengers: Infinity War¹, which allows it to revel in the same comedy/adventure realm as Ant Man and Thor: Ragnarok.

It excelled at said revelry.

My own favorite moment, which I shall not spoil, was when Luis (Michael Peña) gave someone his trademark high-speed recap. I was downright giddy when I realized that the scene was setting it up, and the remainder of the scene did not disappoint.

There were plenty of epic super-hero moments, too, and they struck that perfect balance between humor and heroism. Ant Man and The Wasp clears my Threshold of Awesome², and the soundtrack is going into my music library.

¹ The after-the-credits scenes establish the sequence of events between the two films, and they offer a couple of hints about how Ant Man might play a significant part in Infinity War Part II.
² It takes my top slot, displacing Black Panther, because as brilliantly awesome as Black Panther was, I had more fun watching Ant Man and The Wasp. YMMV.

This morning, as I’m preparing to buy tickets:

Me: “Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom?”
15yo: “Ugh”
Me: “Ugh?”
15yo: “Why does that movie even exist?”
Me: “People running from dinosaurs!”
15yo: “We’ve seen that.”
Me: “In a glass ball!”
15yo: “That too.”
Me: “And they get saved by a dino that eats another dino.”
15yo: “That too.”
Me: “People in a ball running from dinos eating dinos being devoured by a volcano OVER A CLIFF INTO THE OCEAN.”
15yo: “…”
Me: “eh?”
15yo: “Okay, that’s new, but it doesn’t FEEL new.”

True story, and it’s why I went by myself.

I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the cliff-diving hamsterball amid a volcano-powered dinosaur stampede marked the end of Act I. As were pretty much all the scenes from the trailers¹. Nice!

In that spirit, I won’t spoil the film for you. I will, however, state that it doesn’t really feel new. I did enjoy it more than Jurassic World, however. Much more competence on display, for starters. Plenty of stupid mistakes, too, but the people who are supposed to be good at their jobs are quite good at them.

Aaand some of them get eaten by dinos.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom clears my Threshold of Awesome because I was having fun pretty much the whole way through.

¹ Updated to add: I guess I didn’t see ALL the trailers. The movie didn’t get spoiled by trailers for ME, but it definitely got spoiled for other folks. 

Before I begin my review, a public service announcement: Incredibles 2 may trigger seizures in sufferers of photosensitive epilepsy¹, and may in other ways afflict anyone who is sensitive to flashing lights. Seriously. There’s a fight scene in a room full of patterned strobes, and in the darkened theater there will be no steady-state light source to provide refuge for your eyes. The scene is only a small slice of the movie but it’s enough to absolutely ruin your day if flashing lights can hurt you.

And now, the review: I really enjoyed Incredibles 2, but it petered out for me toward the end. My very favorite super-powered engagement took place mid-movie, and while there were plenty of cool heroic bits later, none of them lived up to that level of awesome.

Still, it’s a fun film. It suffers mostly in comparison to Incredibles, which is to my mind the best Fantastic Four film we’ve ever had (in the same way that Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek film we’ve ever had².) Incredibles 2 doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I definitely want to see it again. In my own home, where I can fast-foward through the flashing lights, because they triggered a brief migraine, and I already get enough of those.

¹ I’m not a medical professional, nor an expert in epilepsy, but that scene hurt *me* and I’m just a guy who sometimes gets migraines. The picture on the Epilepsy Foundation’s page? Imagine that, strobing, only without the helpful yellow bits.
² “How can it be, if it’s not ACTUALLY a Star Trek film?” Hence the comparison. It’s kind of nuanced.