Don’t get me wrong, J.K. Rowling is amazing at writing books. She’s one of the greatest at it I know.

But writing a book and writing a movie are two very different things.

One might think that the richest woman in all of Great Britain, a very successful author, would be able to script an amazing blockbuster movie, full of all of the wit and uncanny skill crammed into her books. But what we got from Rowling in November of 2018 was Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, a sub-50% Rotten Tomatoes flick that is the sort of movie that will make you wish, as you leave the theater after watching it, that you could’ve hit pause in order to decipher the complicated plot. Over the course of an excruciating 2-hour-14-minute long Baroque display of special effects, the viewer’s brain is bent as they attempt to follow the characters’ complex story threads while they (the threads, that is) wind themselves into an increasingly convoluted, and flawed, tapestry of plot.

Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), the protagonist of the movie, returns to the screen as a charming, although fairly shallow, magical zookeeper of sorts. His layer of awkward humor tries (rather unsuccessfully) to cover up his lack of defining character traits and emotional depth. Also coming back in this movie are Redmayne’s altogether more interesting costars, Katherine Waterston (as Tina Goldstein), Dan Fogler (Jacob Kowalski), Alison Sudol (Tina’s sister Queenie), and Ezra Miller (Credence Barebone). These familiar faces are joined by new actors Zoë Kravitz, Callum Turner, Claudia Kim, William Nadlyam, and Jude Law, the last as a young Albus Dumbledore. Johnny Depp plays the titular Grindelwald in an “utterly unmemorable” performance as a dark wizard who “looks like he’s been dipped in flour,” according to The New York Times.

The least of this film’s many problems is its inaccuracies with the original series. In Crimes, Professor Dumbledore teaches Defense Against the Dark Arts class at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, while a careful reader of the original Harry Potter series (such as me) would realize that the future headmaster was actually supposed to teach Transfiguration. In addition to this, more things are invented about Dumbledore’s character, such as his *spoiler alert!* long-lost relative. A bigger problem with this movie is the identities of its characters. Turner apparently plays Newt Scamander’s brother, but that is never made clear. Neither was it clarified that Kim’s character was actually later to become the snake of Voldemort, the main villain of the original Harry Potter series. Nadlyam could have been left out of the movie entirely, and it would have been no more confusing. Queenie, Sudol’s character, who was so charming in the first movie, turns evil by the end of “Crimes” for no clear reason at all.

The worst of these confusing characters is perhaps Leta Lestrange (Kravitz), whose backstory is complex to the point of bewildering. Over a plot-interrupting 5-minute flashback, she is revealed to be Scamander’s former love interest, creating a strange dynamic between the two of them throughout the entire movie. To make the romantic subplot, which seems hastily added into the movie at the last second, more interesting, Newt and his brother are both interested in Lestrange, ultimately fighting over her, before she is killed by Grindelwald.

Another big problem with this movie is its dissatisfying ending. The conclusion threatens a third (likely worse, if possible) Fantastic Beasts movie. Many loose ends are left untied in the second installment of the franchise, which (if the viewers are lucky) will be shoddily tied up in the last movie of the aforementioned potential trilogy, if (if the viewers are unlucky) it ever comes out. This series of sequels is very close to beginning to tarnish the chrome legacy of the original Harry Potter movies.

The Harry Potter series is untouchable. Don’t touch it.