Ugh. Really, just UGH.
Maleficent represents the latest in Disney’s Gender Role Reversal series of revisionist children’s fairy tale stories that, apparently, are well made enough to snatch $750 million dollars out of the pockets of people worldwide. This time, we humanize one of the most abjectly evil, sadistic villains in the entire Walt Disney animated canon. Played by Angelina Jolie with appropriate characterization and aplomb, the radical deviations from the source material (along with some unbelievably weird choices in visuals and casting) place this one squarely in the “failure” bin for me personally.
I am not opposed to the idea of remakes, reboots, and new versions of old properties on principle. Sometimes, you can see other people’s visions applied to old material work wonders (video games tend to perform better than movies in this respect, as Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden will prove). Other times, the filmmakers see fit to shoehorn completely new elements without seeming to understand how the old franchise worked. I hesitate to call Sleeping Beauty a franchise, but the wonderfully baroque, stylized visuals and brooding atmospherics lent an eerie, compelling quality to the whole film. For 1959, this was scary stuff, especially once your villain starts yelling that she summons all the powers of hell against our hero (Prince Phillip, who was the only named prince at the time as far as I know). As the last one Walt saw through to the end, it remains a classic.
This…Maleficent movie, on the other hand, relies heavily on the iconography of the original. I think of it as a prequel in an alternate reality than a true link to Sleeping Beauty’s Briar Rose roots. Maleficent, in this version, was a fairy who fell in love with a human, Stefan (the king of the human kingdom in the future). The human kingdom and the magical kingdom of the Moors remain separate due to the fear of humans (no surprise) to things that are different. The Moors represent the bulk of the budget, with all manner of wonderfully generic looking fantasy scenery where everything is awesome and they’re all part of the same “we are innocent magical creatures” team versus the evil, male dominated human side. So they go to invade them, and Maleficent flies around while commander her genderless army in a pseudo-Lord of the Rings battle sequence designed for PG audiences. Everything looks appropriately fake and shiny per the $180 million dollar price tag to make the movie.
Then things get weird. Stefan cuts off her wings in what I can only say might be the most euphemistic, constructively symbolic representation of rape in a PG movie that I’ve ever seen. The plot just gets weirder from there, with Maleficent being not so evil and more like a godmother to Aurora, whom she is supposed to hate but doesn’t because…I don’t know? The other faerie godmothers must be incompetent nitwits, and they just let Aurora run around willy-nilly without protecting her or even being curious why she’s in the Moors with MALEFICENT ARE YOU KIDDING ME. SHE PUT THE CURSE ON HER FOR GOD’S SAKE! It’s not like they are related or anything, by birth or otherwise; Maleficent just learns life lessons by creepily watching Stefan’s daughter grow up after cursing her with sleep/death. The train drives right off the rails, as if Disney wanted to place the penny directly on the tracks where we might actually get, you know, invested before logic kicked in.
To get here, the film replaces a charismatic one-note villain with a different one, unsurprisingly a man. King Stefan, because he is a man, is our villain in this feminist re-imagining, and he is gloriously awful, paranoid, and prone to fits of violence even to death. Even Prince Phillips gets the shaft and his kiss proves completely ineffectual, because true love only occurs between family relations, as you might recall from 2013’s Frozen (i.e., The New Disney Canon Where Males Must Go to Marvel Movies Instead). And then she gets her wings back somehow? Which is completely confusing and I don’t understand how the rules of this universe work?
The problem with the film does not lie in its radical choices, but its lack of direction. Frankly, they wanted to take some creative risks while appealing to their newly cultivated female-focused (and cultural-ethos driven) audience. Instead, they end up with a 97 minute film that paints everything in such broad strokes that the details immediately blur out. At least Frozen gave me the courtesy of, gasp, character development along with its social messages; here, I just see Angelina Jolie scowling and pouting a whole lot, with the odd bit of strange imagery thrown into the mix. Not memorable imagery like the original:
Just weird!
They want us to see Maleficent as both a hero and a villain, a complex character whose “evil” does not represent the true picture, but I honestly could not tell what position the movie really took on the matter. That’s because, really, the Maleficent of Sleeping Beauty was not a complex character at all; she was evil, and reveled in her evil. The inspired sadism of not only killing the king’s daughter (the three fairies to take care of her make it a sleeping curse), but also to kidnap the only one who could save her until he was incredibly old, just reeks of someone who loves being evil a little too much. Evil, in the Sleeping Beauty world, is forthrightly, distinctly, evil, and can only be conquered with good.
You cannot paint a picture of black and white and add color to it; a stencil etching work by Goya does not suddenly become better by adding a vibrant prism to its darkened palette. So it is here that all the people involved in this project simply missed the heart and soul of the original. This is why the film feels so fast, rushed, confused, and all over the pace in regards to character pacing, logic, and establishing any clear vision for who, or what, Maleficent really is.
Would I recommend it? Absolutely not; I can’t say it was worth my time, but if you like weird train wrecks like this, than have at it.
