thoughts on Maleficent(2014)?

[mrrockey]

Any thoughts on Maleficent(2014)?

In short, I thought it was cliche, predictable, had extremely simplistic character motivations/development, and an overall disappointing cast. Some minor saving graces include Jolie's performance, some good-looking visuals, a beautiful score, one or two fun action scenes, and a really good cover of "Once Upon a Dream" by Lana Del Ray but that's about it.

But what did you think?

Discuss...

[BatmanFanatic93]

Yeeeeeesh that bad huh? 

[mrrockey]

Yeeeeeesh that bad huh? 

The worst thing is, there's like, 23 or so more Disney remakes coming out in the following years. No, I'm not kidding, I'm scared.

[johnnygobbs]

Any thoughts on Maleficent(2014)?

In short, I thought it was cliche, predictable, had extremely simplistic character motivations/development, and an overall disappointing cast. Some minor saving graces include Jolie's performance, some good-looking visuals, a beautiful score, one or two fun action scenes, and a really good cover of "Once Upon a Dream" by Lana Del Ray but that's about it.

But what did you think?

Discuss...

I haven't see the film mrrockey but I'm curious.  How sympathetically are the two female characters presented in the film?  I also understand that there is some reference to sexual abuse.  How does this manifest and how is it dealt with?

[Cobblepot4Mayor]

I have yet to see it but will be doing so this Friday on my mum's birthday. I know enough about it however to know it will likely divide me 50/50. One thing that puzzles me is why change the three famous fairies names from the original animated movie to the bland new ones they have? I mean they retain their famous colour coded costumes. My autistic sister will simply be referring to them by their original names to avoid needless confusion (and a sense of utter killjoy). They were great names and easy to remember. I simply don't get it.

If you know your Disney history you will know it's not the first time Disney have produced a "flesh n blood" version of their animated classics and as stated by a poster above plans are afoot for a whole slew of them in the coming years. Kenneth Brannagh is doing "Cinderella" and Jon Favreau is handling "The Jungle Book". A version of this latter film was done way back in 1994 when I was a child. Directed by Stephen Sommers ("The Mummy", "Van Helsing"). Needless to say it was a mixed bag. Much darker and having little to nothing to do with the animated movie itself, much less Kipling (despite it's eyebrow raising title of "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book"). It was more "Stephen Sommer's The Jungle Book" in fact. Transforming Mowgli into a fully grown Tarzan clone and giving him an Indiana Jones style temples and treasure, gung ho, action adventure outing. I still liked it however. It was well made and entertaining and most excitingly (at the time) was in fact promoted here in the UK as being a live action version of the 1967 Disney cartoon. Sommers, a fan of the Disney animation, tossed in a few wonderful references here and there.  Such as the inclusion of none other than King Louie and having John Cleese paraphrase a line directly from "The Bear Necessities" song. Not long after I saw the far better and brilliantly realised live action version of "101 Dalmatians" (written by the late, great John Hughes no less). This thing was almost a perfect translation with every line uttered from Glenn Close's mouth as Cruella De Ville lifted straight from the animation (not to mention her car and appearance). I couldn't help but wonder as a child why on earth Disney never bothered to do more films in the style of these. The possibilities seemed endless in seeing their animated masterpieces being brought to life. It's on the same level for me at seeing any Batman movie or more appropriately the first live action Ninja Turtles. All these years later it would seem they've finally woken up.

But here now is the frustrating catch. It'd be nice if they wished to follow the formula established with "101 Dalmatians" and bringing the animated world's properly to life. Kids I think still get a delightful kick out of that sort of thing. It seems that nowadays however filmmakers choose to change everything entirely. Older Disney fans themselves seem to want these new live action versions to be "darker", "maturer" and "grittier". In short films with little resemblance to what they are based from. Thus the point of doing them at all falls apart for me. And that awful phrase, "a new take on something". Urgh. Why? That misses the point for me of what Disney is. "Maleificent" looks intriguing for example but apart from Angelina Jolie, who looks the spitting image of the animated villain, there is not much else in the film to get excited about far as I can see. It looks like they simply have an original story that bares little resemblance to the wonderful animated "Sleeping Beauty". It feels in fact to be something of a con.

"The Jungle Book" is my favourite and I am delighted we will have a newer version (to have Idris Elba and Scarlet Johansson starring), hopefully getting right this time what the 1994 version did not. Many critics appear to be getting the project wrong just now, assuming that Favreau is doing yet another straight Kipling adaptation in rivalry with Andy Serkis'. But based on recent Favreau comments I've read he is clearly a fan of the Disney film and is even going to the trouble of incoporating the Sherman Brothers music into the score, even though the movie will be no musical per se. If you want the Kipling faifthful material I think you better wait for the Warner Bros Andy Serkis project. So I believe and hope we will end up with something in this future project a lot closer to it's animated ancestor than what Maleificent had the potential to be but has perhaps thrown such an opportunity away. Hopefully any others will follow suit to.

[mrrockey]

Any thoughts on Maleficent(2014)?

In short, I thought it was cliche, predictable, had extremely simplistic character motivations/development, and an overall disappointing cast. Some minor saving graces include Jolie's performance, some good-looking visuals, a beautiful score, one or two fun action scenes, and a really good cover of "Once Upon a Dream" by Lana Del Ray but that's about it.

But what did you think?

Discuss...

I haven't see the film mrrockey but I'm curious.  How sympathetically are the two female characters presented in the film?  I also understand that there is some reference to sexual abuse.  How does this manifest and how is it dealt with?

Maleficent isn't even really a villain in the film. She starts out as an innocent fairy who only turns that way after King Stefan betrays her and breaks her heart but she's only evil for like, 5 minutes. After cursing Aurora, all she does is play innocent pranks on the fairies protecting Aurora(whom, she finds RIGHT after they take her from the palace) and eventually, grows a heart and learns to love Aurora and becomes a mother figure to her. In fact, she's the one who saves her from the spell in the end. I don't mind changes being made but I hate how they made a villain as badass as Maleficent into a walking cliche with the most overused backstory ever.

Aurora isn't really changed much from the original. She's still the sweet, innocent girl except this time, a bit of a moron as she ACTUALLY THINKS Maleficent her fairy godmother!

About the sexual abuse references, I've heard this mentioned on IMDB forums but I myself never really spotted any while watching the film.  I guess you could interpret King Stefan stealing Maleficent's fairy wings in the beginning as a metaphor for rape, as if he's "stealing" her virginity but I don't remember any lines of dialogue or images hinting at rape or any type of sexual abuse. But I could've just missed them, who knows?

[zDBZ]

My incredibly long and angry review from another site. Spoilers:

I confess that, in this day and age of constant Internet coverage of everything, it's impossible for me to go into any movie with a completely open mind. Even if I've only seen a trailer, I develop opinions I take in to the theatre. In the case of Maleficent, I had misgivings about the very notion of doing a film like this the minute it was announced. News of a hideous leaked script (which I didn't read), losing two experienced directors to a first-timer, re-shoots and uncredited rewrites, and the trailers and TV spots did nothing to encourage me, and I was less than quiet about my attitude toward the movie with friends. However, no one should judge a work of art without seeing it, so I went in (when the local theatre offered matinee prices), and did all I could to open my mind.

In reading other reviews of Maleficent, a common thread I've noticed among many of those who enjoyed it and wish to defend it from critics is that Maleficent is not the 1959 Sleeping Beauty, and should be taken as its own entity. But from interviews with Linda Woolverton and Angelina Jolie that claim this film is meant to be Maleficent's "side of the story" to Disney's own promotional material (some of which made use of footage and music from Sleeping Beauty), it is clear that this picture was absolutely meant to connect to its animated predecessor, that it was meant to be an adaptation/revision/alternative take on the same story. It is therefore not possible IMO to separate the two movies; Maleficent has to be judged, at least in part, on its efforts to present a different take on the first film. And in that regard, Maleficent is one of the most unbelievable insults I've ever seen a studio deliver to its own property.

Maleficent has been referred to by several reviewers as a "feminist, revisionist take" on Sleeping Beauty. Some have gone so far as to use this line to hail the new over the old, dismissing 1959's offering as a silly fairy tale that offers nothing positive for today's young girls. If these critics have actually seen Sleeping Beauty, I doubt that they've seen it recently. By the very nature of the story, the sleeping beauty herself (whatever her name in whatever telling) cannot be the protagonist; she is the stakes. But Disney's Sleeping Beauty doesn't offer up Phillip as the main character either. The true protagonists of Sleeping Beauty are the Three Good Fairies. They're the ones who temper Maleficent's curse, devise the plan to keep Aurora safe, deliver her back to the castle and make the crucial mistake of leaving her alone, discover that Phillip is her true love, free him from captivity, and ultimately kill Maleficent. They are easily the most developed and proactive characters in the piece, and they are motivated by no more than love for the child they have cared for as a niece. And, along with offering three old women as its heroes, Sleeping Beauty has a female antagonist, Maleficent, who is motivated by nothing more than the chance to spite people. So, 1959 gave us a major studio release, intended for all ages and genders, with three middle-aged women as the heroes up against a more powerful and attractive villainess, and none of them are motivated by anything to do with men. Would such a big release ever make it past marketing today? I don't mean to sweep away any and all concerns people have raised of Disney's past treatment of female characters, but whether you like the film or not, Sleeping Beauty deserves credit for not only offering four female leads, but doing so ahead of its time, and indeed, this time. Fast forward to 2014, and the only one of those four to remain prominent in Maleficent - Maleficent herself - is given a very standard motivation of a woman scorned, her reason for doing anything wicked being a man. I ask all those praising the "feminist, revisionist take" - do you really consider this progress, or a better offering for your daughters?

Woolverton and Jolie both have said in interviews that Maleficent is a villain in her own movie, and that said movie explores why she becomes what she is in Sleeping Beauty. But what is Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty? Why has this character endured and risen up to be viewed as the cream of the crop of Disney villains? What are her defining attributes? Her look, obviously; horns, skin, robes cut like flames, the bat-like collar. The milieu around her as well; the castle she lives in, her goblin army, her raven. There are her powers: she appears and disappears at will, shoots lightning, casts curses, raises thorns, and alone among Disney villains, Maleficent calls upon Hell itself, to become a giant dragon that breathes green fire. Finally, there is her self-styling as the Mistress of all Evil, unapologetically and gleefully. In this respect, the Maleficent movie is an abysmal failure, as the character never becomes a villain, never becomes what she was in the 1959 film, and nearly all of the iconography surrounding her is greatly diluted or thrown out altogether. Maleficent's title is nowhere to be heard; the word "evil" is rarely even muttered in the picture. Hell is out, as are the goblins and the castle (she explores some ruins; where they are or whose they are is never explained, and she makes no abode there). There is a dragon, but it's not Maleficent; she possesses no transformative powers, nor can she apparently travel anywhere except on foot. By the end, even her costume is shed, the flaming robes and collar exchanged for a black leather catsuit straight out of a B-list action flick. What remains are the thorns and the raven, who is transformed into an all-purpose henchman. This henchman plays the role of the dragon. Imagine a Boba Fett movie where it turns out that Fett isn't the guy in the suit; instead, he hired a henchman to wear the helmet, and he stays at home eating chips and telling the guy what to do over the phone. I can't imagine many people being satisfied with that, but by stripping its lead of most of her defining traits and farming out the most powerful one to a henchman, Maleficent does exactly that.

Worse than discarding the iconography, though, is Maleficent's failure to live up to the promise of its writer and star: to have Maleficent ever actually become a villain. The only wicked act she performs is the cursing of Aurora, the daughter of the man behind the "woman scorned" angle. But even this is diluted; instead of condemning the child to death, a fate only averted by Merryweather's gift, Maleficent curses the child to sleep forever, diluting her own curse to allow for "true love's kiss." And immediately - immediately - after this, she begins to have second thoughts. The film at least has the decency to have a small space of time wherein one might think that Maleficent's "change of heart" is really an effort to ensure the child lives long enough to be cursed, but it doesn't last. And it's not only in the curse that is watered down; while the 1959 Maleficent tortured her minions and took advantage of Merryweather's gift to create a fate worse than death for Phillip and Aurora, this Maleficent plays one petty prank on the fairies and...well, that's about it. No other deed committed by Maleficent in the entire movie can be construed as evil or cold-hearted. Her treatment of her henchman is entirely fair, and the battles she engages in before and after the man's betrayal are entirely justified.

Of course, this is meant to be a Wicked-style reinterpretation of Sleeping Beauty, so one would expect at least some of her actions to be justified. I have problems with Wicked, for some of the same reasons of adaptation as I have with Maleficent. The Wicked Witch of the West, like Maleficent, is a character beloved for being so unashamedly evil, and is interesting for all the ways large and small that such evil is expressed. When you take that purity of depravity away from such characters, something needs to be inserted to replace it. Wicked offers political intrigue and complex relationships between Elphaba and her family and friends. And, at least in the original book, the Wicked Witch actually does become wicked at a certain point. Maleficent has nothing comparable to offer to make up for its stripping its namesake of her former personality. The relationship that drives her to curse Aurora is painfully underdeveloped (more on that later). The film's biggest effort to give Maleficent something to make up for lack-of-evil is her growing maternal feelings toward Aurora, but even this is underwritten, and a fair amount of the relationship building is farmed out to the raven just as the dragon powers were. For the vast majority of this picture, Maleficent's only action is to stand and stare. The end result is that one of cinema's greatest villains is, in her own movie, rendered into a very bland heroine - not even an anti-heroine, but a heroine, with almost nothing to do for most of the run-time.

Another thing Wicked did right (moreso on the stage than on the page) that Maleficent didn't was that it realised that it isn't necessary to do a complete reversal. If one of the goals of these revisionist tellings is to show that the lines dividing good and evil are blurred and complicated, it surely behooves them to colour the characters who become the antagonists in shades of grey. More than anything it does to Maleficent herself, this film's greatest sin is in how it treats other Sleeping Beauty characters. While Wicked recognised the conflict between the witches in the Oz books as an opportunity to craft a complicated friendship challenged by politics, Maleficent takes the old film's conflict between fairies and ignores it altogether. Those Three Good Fairies who carried the original picture are here given new names and rendered as idiots, a fact the film feels the need to remind us of multiple times. It's clear that they were intended as comic relief, a feat they fail spectacularly at. The way the plot is structured (again, more on that later), their presence in the film is completely pointless. Linda Woolverton has claimed in interviews that she had to "dilute" the Three Good Fairies in order to make this Maleficent's story, but she would have done well to look up the definition of the word "overkill" before she worked on those pages of her script. And her decision to render King Stephen - one of Disney's only parents to survive, and a good-natured comic figure in the original - into a paper-thin villain whose motivations and character turns are exclusively expressed through narration - "tell, don't show" at its worst - is similarly excessive. As with the choice to leave Maleficent with little to do for so much of the movie, this renders Stephen far less interesting here than he was as a comedy team with King Hubert in the original. There is no point in discussing Aurora and Phillip, as they have even less personality and business here than they did in Sleeping Beauty - and, in Aurora's case especially, that is saying something.

But now, having explained why I think this film has to be compared to 1959 and having devoted considerable energy to doing so, I will now set aside Sleeping Beauty and take Maleficent as its own picture. Does it have a coherent and interesting plot? Intriguing characters? Attractive design? Good music? Compelling performances? Across the board, I would say no.

I mentioned the narration before in regards to Stephen, but as a whole, I haven't seen a film so reliant upon narration since The Last Airbender. The first few minutes, wherein we see Maleficent as a child meeting Stephen and falling in love with him, show very little; we have to be told what's going on inside the hearts of the characters. The conflict between fairies and humans is told in narration. Again, all of Stephen's character turns are conveyed through narration. Maleficent's growing attachment to Aurora - the crux upon which this reinterpretation rests -  is heavily dependent upon narration, because that relationship is so condensed and, again, a fair amount of it is farmed out to the henchman. When the narration breaks in is awkwardly chosen, and it was an incredibly frustrating experience to have it cutting in so often. It has been claimed that the reshoots for this movie only concerned the first few minutes, but it's hard for me not to feel that much of this narration was added after the fact to try and patch up cracks created by editing.

But the patches don't help. So much of this movie does not make sense within its own logic. To list just a few of the problems that stood out to me:

1. We're told in the beginning of the film that the Moors, the fairyland, had no ruler, and this is presented as a good thing. By the end of the film, Aurora is queen of both kingdoms, and everybody's happy about that. Why?
2. Maleficent seizes control over the Moors, becoming its ruler. Right after this comes the christening of Aurora, where the Three Good Fairies appear as ambassadors for peace. But since Maleficent is already ruler of the Moors, and these three are part of that kingdom firmly under her control, who are they ambassadors for? And when Maleficent turns up, why is she so hostile to them, at the christening and later on, when no animosity was established between them?
3. During the christening, Stephen is suspicious of the Three Good Fairies, and it is only his wife's prodding that convinces him to let them give Aurora gifts. Why does he give his daughter to them, right after Maleficent makes her curse, and when no one has worked out why hiding Aurora makes for a good plan? This is what I mean by the Three Fairies being completely pointless to the plot; by reducing them so much and changing the relationship between men and magic so much, this film renders the whole concept of keeping the child safe in the woods irrelevant.
4. When Aurora grows up into Elle Fanning, Maleficent decides to kidnap her and take her to the Moors, apparently to delight her. Why is she doing this now? She's been watching over this child and keeping her safe from the incompetence of the Three Fairies for almost sixteen years by this point. There is no reason why she couldn't or wouldn't have done this sooner.

And if the plot isn't full of holes, it's lacking in stakes. Maleficent losing her wings because of a man's betrayal is supposed to be the catalyst here, but at no point before or after this is the importance of fairy wings established. If they don't have them - so what? Do they lose their powers? Do wings mean something in fairy society? Are they a vital part of the anatomy? It's been argued by many that this is some sort of symbolic representation of rape or genital mutilation, and that's not invalid, but it's something that the viewer has to insert into the picture for the loss of wings to have any weight; the film itself offers nothing in that regard. A fairy's weakness to iron is a new element here, but the burns that they leave heal instantaneously and don't appear to do any more than sting for a bit.

I don't see much point in retreading character in this section, as I've already tread on that ground. So far as the performances of those characters are concerned - a universal feature of every review, positive or negative, has been that Angelina Jolie gave a wonderful performance. I can't even give the film that credit; I'm not sure what people are seeing. Jolie was clearly not phoning this performance in, nor was she hamming it up; she took it seriously and tried her best. But she has nothing to work with. As I said, for most of the film, she's called upon to stand and stare; a challenge given to many actors, and many get a lot out of it. But compared to, say, Michael Keaton in the Burton Batman films, Jolie is dealing with a script that is much shallower, and her eyes are not as expressive. Her dialogue offers very little for an actress to play with, often consisting of single sentences or fragments of sentences. And in the one scene that allows her to stretch her legs and actually play Maleficent as, well, Maleficent - the christening - Jolie comes across too soft, and too cute, to manage the sort of menace that Elanor Audley achieved.

The rest of the cast is no better served so far as material goes. Aside from Aurora and Phillip, all the humans have Scottish accents. The young kid and the adult tasked with playing Stephen manage this about as well as the cast of my high school production of Brigadoon did. The actresses playing the Three Fairies are asked to be funny annoying idiots; they manage the last two, but I can't imagine anyone getting genuine comedy out of this material.

Visually - this film is competently directed. Robert Stromberg, in his debut, is technically capable. By this I mean that his blocking, camera placement and movement, and editing are not confusing or laughable. But you would never know that Stromberg also didn't design the film; it looks just like his creations for Avatar, Alice, and Oz, which I found interesting more than truly breathtaking and magical. The CGI creatures look fake - very fake, the Three Fairies being the most hideous example. Some of the forest creatures have oddly cartoonish and Muppet-like designs, at odds with the environment that they're set in. And a strange plot hole rests on the design: when Maleficent takes control of the Moors, the environment changes. Not by much; it becomes slightly darker, and a tree bends into a throne, but beyond that, hardly anything is different. At the end of the film, Maleficent shows Aurora the Moors "as it used to be, when [Maleficent's] heart was pure." But Aurora has already seen the Moors, and was delighted and enchanted by it as it was. The difference is so negligible that this plot point might as well not exist. And if the design is rather generic, so is the music and the action.

So, I clearly did not enjoy Maleficent. But in a way, the worst thing about this movie is that it's not as bad as it might have been, or as I thought it might be. The best word I can think of to describe this film is "tepid." Battles never become full-fledged, emotional scenes are restrained, the comedy is weak and rarely attempted, and little effort is put into creating any vistas of majesty or splendor. Had this movie had more blood in it, and dared to go all-out in any given direction, it might have been technically worse, but it would have elicited a stronger reaction from me. The feeling I had throughout Maleficent was a dull, annoyed ache. I groaned a few times, but I never felt like bolting out of the theatre or yelling at the screen. When I compare this to something like The Last Airbender or X-Men: The Last Stand - at least those films were extreme enough that I had more of a reaction to them. And, while both of those are terrible adaptations of pre-existing material (the former in particular), neither went out of its way to purposefully demean characters or insult aspects of its source. Maleficent does this throughout, fails even as a stand-alone story, and doesn't even fail badly enough to be more than boring.

3 out of 10.