Question: Why didn't Mrs Whatsit turn into a winged centaur as she did in the book? What made them alter the magic creature into a living leaf?
Answer: The biggest critical complaint about this film is that director Ava DuVernay and her screenwriters essentially gutted Madeleine L'Engle's award-winning children's book and turned it into nothing more than Disneyesque eye candy, discarding many important elements of L'Engle's story and arbitrarily refitting it with lightweight (and boring) motivational platitudes. In other words, DuVernay made the movie her soapbox for "social messaging" and tossed out much of the wondrous (and even miraculous) detail that made L'Engle's original book a huge success. Consequently, this movie was a colossal financial failure.
Interestingly, Disney had adapted this story for the screen before (in 2004), and the earlier version did include the flying centaur (albeit a bad CGI rendering). Unfortunately, the 2004 version was also a box-office failure for Disney, and for the same reason as the 2018 remake: Disney removed the magical and spiritual qualities that gave L'Engle's original story its depth.
Disney's previous adaptation was released in 2003 as a TV movie, so it wasn't a "box-office failure", it was just a terrible movie.
Question: At the beginning, why did Grindelwald let Spielman live by dropping a wand off the carriage and letting Spielman grasp that wand?
Answer: From a story standpoint, Spielman is the only person who could've identified the blood pact as belonging to Grindelwald. Since he appears alongside Newt and the others at the end of the film, I think we're supposed to believe he was the one who identified it after the Niffler stole it from Grindelwald - meaning him surviving the escape sequence was written in so he could do that. From a character standpoint, Grindelwald likely wanted there to be a public account of how he'd escaped custody, so that people would be more in awe of his power than if no-one had lived to tell the tale.
Answer: Like any other such change from the source material, it's just artistic license.
wizard_of_gore ★