Maleficent, Part II: The New Movie, Act One
Link to Part I
Enjoy Part II: The New Movie, Act I, or: What Part of "Show, Don't Tell" Did You Not Understand?
The New Movie, Act I
When I heard that Disney was making a live-action Sleeping Beauty retelling from Maleficent’s point of view, I got really excited. I was especially excited after I saw the first trailer, which was genuinely atmospheric and creepy, and didn’t give away what they were going to do with it (of course, now I kind of wish it had).
Villain lover that I am, I was delighted that Disney was finally going to probe more into its own darker half that it hinted at years ago with Hunchback, and tell a story from the point of view of one of its grandest villainous creations. The fact that they picked a villain who could never be mistaken for a good guy got my hopes up even more, because it meant we were going to get a serious villain protagonist in a family movie, something nearly unheard.
Yeah, in retrospect, I probably should have known better. But I had hopes, okay?
They got dashed. Every single hope I had for this movie got dashed. There are so many things that are so wrong with it that I can’t decide where to start. I believe that the filmmakers had the best of intentions going in, but I also believe that most people act with good intentions most of the time, and the means don’t justify the ends.
Christ, where to begin with this mess? Well, I guess I can start with those many revealed plot points I promised earlier.
We open with a narrator telling us that we’re going to experience “an old tale told anew.” This narrator, who outstays her welcome after she’s been around about two minutes, leads us to two kingdoms: a beautiful perfect magical fairy kingdom where everything is sunshine and marshmallows all the time, which lives next door to the greedy, evil, violent kingdom of…MAN!!! (Um, I thought we were doing Sleeping Beauty, when did we switch over to Bambi?) If that’s not exactly how the narrator describes these two kingdoms, it’s a lot closer than I’d like it to be. For a movie that purports to complicate the “good” and “evil” categories, we’re off to a shaky start.
Oh, wait, I’m sorry. The Kingdom of Sunshine and Marshmallows isn’t a kingdom. They don’t need a king or queen, because they’re just that perfectly in harmony with nature and with each other. Way to complicate those categories of good and evil, movie. Fine, it’s the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune of Sunshine and Marshmallows.
You can tell almost instantly that the director of the film, Robert Stromberg, has a background in special effects design. Living in the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune of Sunshine and Marshmallows are a couple hundred CGI magical creatures and a single humanoid: a cheery, angel-faced little darlin’ with horns and big black wings. Wait…what? Oh no…no, this can’t be…
“And her name was Maleficent.”
…seriously?
Okay, writers, we’re going to do a little exercise here: open a dictionary to the “M” section. Look up what “maleficent” means. Here’s what the OED has to say:
“Maleficent: harmful, hurtful, malefic; given to evildoing, a criminal.”
Got that? “Maleficent” MEANS “EVIL.” Its Latin root, maleficus, refers to something demonic and malevolent, something that wants to hurt you. Her parents, wherever they are (we later find out they’re dead), need a good talking-to. It’s one thing for her to have that name when she’s supposed to be the personification of all evil, but it’s obvious you’ve already dumped that aspect for the time being. It doesn’t work when she’s a perfectly normal kid. This is akin to naming your kid Murderous or Diabolical - the kid’s not going to turn out right, okay? I know you think you’re subverting our expectations, but what you’re doing is looking like you didn’t do the slightest bit of homework. We’re five minutes into the movie and I’m already tightening my grip on my soda.
Anyway, child Totally Not Maleficent in Any Way spends her days frolicking about the Anarcho-Syndicalist Comm…you know what, from now on, it’s just the ASCOSAM…and communing with the tree spirits and throwing pond muck at the pond spirits and swooping about on her big old black birdie wings and she’s just so goshdarn playful and innocent and oh no Disney please don’t go where I absolutely know you are going…
Yep. And it all changes when she meets a boy. Specifically, a peasant orphan named Stefan (savvy viewers or fans of the animated flick will recall this as the name of Aurora’s dad) who has snuck into the ASCOSAM to steal a fancy stone from its magical pond. This is a no-no in the ASCOSAM, and Maleficent berates him for taking it from its natural place. But he seems like a cute enough kid, and he wants to come back and hang out with her again. And after a few weeks, much to Maleficent’s surprise, he does just that.
Stefan and Maleficent then develop a beautiful, transformative, years-long best friendship that gradually blossoms into a romance for both of them. It culminates in a kiss on Maleficent’s sixteenth birthday, which Stefan tells her is the Kiss of True Love.
How do we know that all this happens? Do we know it because the movie devotes time to developing these characters, to exploring their merits and flaws, to letting them learn about each other and teach each other, and to bringing them closer and closer together in spite of their myriad differences?
No. We know it happens because the narrator tells us it happens. That’s right. This friendship, which is probably the biggest development in either character’s life up to now, is developed via twenty seconds of expositive narration. The only thing we see onscreen is some brief flashing images of them hanging out, paying off in a shady silhouette of them smooching.
Why? Why did you do this, writers? This is one of the most basic rules of good storytelling: show, don’t tell. You are demanding that viewers take your word for it that these two became best buds, followed by boyfriend and girlfriend, and in the process, you let them have zero character development. In a movie-time span of eight or nine years, we learn exactly no things about either of these characters. My soda-clutching fingers are itching.
As it turns out, the writers did this because if they had actually shown this development and given the characters some personality, we might not have bought it when Stefan just turns into a complete monster for no reason.
See, after that kiss on Mal’s birthday, Stefan just up and left her for reasons the movie doesn’t explain. Back in the Evil Kingdom of Evil, there’s this asshole king who hates Fairyland because…yeah, that’s another thing the movie doesn’t explain. He seems to hate it just because it’s there and not his. Anyway, the asshole king tries to attack the ASCOSAM, and he gets humiliated in the process because a now fully-grown Mal, played by Angelina Jolie’s cheekbones, delivers him a beatdown alongside her tree spirit minions. (For people with no established ruler, these spirit dudes seem awfully willing to lay down their spirit lives just because Maleficent tells them to.) To the movie’s credit, this is a really well-done battle scene. The king and his foot soldiers don’t stand a chance once Mal swoops in and gives them what-for with her big-ass bird wings. It gave me some anticipatory hope for even cooler battle scenes once Maleficent went full-on evil. Which she’s gonna do, right, movie? Right?
Anyway, the king is pissed because Maleficent handed him his ass, and as he lays dying, he promises the throne to anyone who can “avenge” him, by which he means take the bitch down. She really did him some wrong by…defending her home against a completely unprovoked attack? Yeah, this character has no motivation and makes no sense, he’s just a zero-dimensional mega-jerk. Stefan, as it turns out, has gone from being a peasant orphan to one of the king’s top minions (how this happened, we’ll never know - it’s one of the many things the movie leaves unexplained in favor of exposition), and he decides it’s going to be him. Stefan, you see, is very ambitious - ambitious enough to completely and utterly betray the woman he loves for his own gain. We know this, not because he has ever done anything indicating that he is this ambitious, but because the narrator just told us that he is. Thanks, narrator! Glad we solved that problem so easily!
So Stefan goes back to ASCOSAM to say hi to Mal and get on her good side again, and for the first bit of this sequence, it looks like he might actually still be a decent guy: he seems to be there to warn her that the king is after her. Cue the unfolding of one of the most talked-about and screwed-up sequences in the movie.
Stefan and Mal have a great night together, chatting until the wee hours (I’m sure you can guess, at this point, how we know this to be the case), until Stefan offers her some water from a pouch he brought along. But the water was a trap: it was spiked with some kind of magical roofie cocktail that puts her into a deep sleep. But Stefan can’t quite bring himself to kill her, so instead, he cuts off her giant wings and brings them back to the king as “proof” that he killed her. When Mal wakes up, she is understandably heartbroken and devastated. Jolie actually really sells this scene: her sobbing as she discovers how she’s been violated and cast aside is gut-wrenching. It’s evident and believable that this betrayal is going to be the impetus for The Darkening and her transformation into the villainous Malficent.
But.
I see what you did here, Disney.
No one missed the heavy-handed metaphor for a completely different kind of violation that was present in this scene. We are now officially in a rape-revenge story. We are also in a story that is going to try to make a Culturally Relevant Point. I don’t…immediately hate this. The setup to it was atrocious and phony, but what’s done is done. Rape-revenge can be very compelling if it is done well. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I am hesitant about whether it’s going to be anything close to “done well.” But we’re only finishing Act One. There’s time. I loosen my grip on my soda a bit.
Stay tuned for Part III!
Enjoy Part II: The New Movie, Act I, or: What Part of "Show, Don't Tell" Did You Not Understand?
The New Movie, Act I
When I heard that Disney was making a live-action Sleeping Beauty retelling from Maleficent’s point of view, I got really excited. I was especially excited after I saw the first trailer, which was genuinely atmospheric and creepy, and didn’t give away what they were going to do with it (of course, now I kind of wish it had).
Click to viewVillain lover that I am, I was delighted that Disney was finally going to probe more into its own darker half that it hinted at years ago with Hunchback, and tell a story from the point of view of one of its grandest villainous creations. The fact that they picked a villain who could never be mistaken for a good guy got my hopes up even more, because it meant we were going to get a serious villain protagonist in a family movie, something nearly unheard.
Yeah, in retrospect, I probably should have known better. But I had hopes, okay?
They got dashed. Every single hope I had for this movie got dashed. There are so many things that are so wrong with it that I can’t decide where to start. I believe that the filmmakers had the best of intentions going in, but I also believe that most people act with good intentions most of the time, and the means don’t justify the ends.
Christ, where to begin with this mess? Well, I guess I can start with those many revealed plot points I promised earlier.
We open with a narrator telling us that we’re going to experience “an old tale told anew.” This narrator, who outstays her welcome after she’s been around about two minutes, leads us to two kingdoms: a beautiful perfect magical fairy kingdom where everything is sunshine and marshmallows all the time, which lives next door to the greedy, evil, violent kingdom of…MAN!!! (Um, I thought we were doing Sleeping Beauty, when did we switch over to Bambi?) If that’s not exactly how the narrator describes these two kingdoms, it’s a lot closer than I’d like it to be. For a movie that purports to complicate the “good” and “evil” categories, we’re off to a shaky start.
Oh, wait, I’m sorry. The Kingdom of Sunshine and Marshmallows isn’t a kingdom. They don’t need a king or queen, because they’re just that perfectly in harmony with nature and with each other. Way to complicate those categories of good and evil, movie. Fine, it’s the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune of Sunshine and Marshmallows.
You can tell almost instantly that the director of the film, Robert Stromberg, has a background in special effects design. Living in the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune of Sunshine and Marshmallows are a couple hundred CGI magical creatures and a single humanoid: a cheery, angel-faced little darlin’ with horns and big black wings. Wait…what? Oh no…no, this can’t be…
“And her name was Maleficent.”
…seriously?
Okay, writers, we’re going to do a little exercise here: open a dictionary to the “M” section. Look up what “maleficent” means. Here’s what the OED has to say:
“Maleficent: harmful, hurtful, malefic; given to evildoing, a criminal.”
Got that? “Maleficent” MEANS “EVIL.” Its Latin root, maleficus, refers to something demonic and malevolent, something that wants to hurt you. Her parents, wherever they are (we later find out they’re dead), need a good talking-to. It’s one thing for her to have that name when she’s supposed to be the personification of all evil, but it’s obvious you’ve already dumped that aspect for the time being. It doesn’t work when she’s a perfectly normal kid. This is akin to naming your kid Murderous or Diabolical - the kid’s not going to turn out right, okay? I know you think you’re subverting our expectations, but what you’re doing is looking like you didn’t do the slightest bit of homework. We’re five minutes into the movie and I’m already tightening my grip on my soda.
Anyway, child Totally Not Maleficent in Any Way spends her days frolicking about the Anarcho-Syndicalist Comm…you know what, from now on, it’s just the ASCOSAM…and communing with the tree spirits and throwing pond muck at the pond spirits and swooping about on her big old black birdie wings and she’s just so goshdarn playful and innocent and oh no Disney please don’t go where I absolutely know you are going…
Yep. And it all changes when she meets a boy. Specifically, a peasant orphan named Stefan (savvy viewers or fans of the animated flick will recall this as the name of Aurora’s dad) who has snuck into the ASCOSAM to steal a fancy stone from its magical pond. This is a no-no in the ASCOSAM, and Maleficent berates him for taking it from its natural place. But he seems like a cute enough kid, and he wants to come back and hang out with her again. And after a few weeks, much to Maleficent’s surprise, he does just that.
Stefan and Maleficent then develop a beautiful, transformative, years-long best friendship that gradually blossoms into a romance for both of them. It culminates in a kiss on Maleficent’s sixteenth birthday, which Stefan tells her is the Kiss of True Love.
How do we know that all this happens? Do we know it because the movie devotes time to developing these characters, to exploring their merits and flaws, to letting them learn about each other and teach each other, and to bringing them closer and closer together in spite of their myriad differences?
No. We know it happens because the narrator tells us it happens. That’s right. This friendship, which is probably the biggest development in either character’s life up to now, is developed via twenty seconds of expositive narration. The only thing we see onscreen is some brief flashing images of them hanging out, paying off in a shady silhouette of them smooching.
Why? Why did you do this, writers? This is one of the most basic rules of good storytelling: show, don’t tell. You are demanding that viewers take your word for it that these two became best buds, followed by boyfriend and girlfriend, and in the process, you let them have zero character development. In a movie-time span of eight or nine years, we learn exactly no things about either of these characters. My soda-clutching fingers are itching.
As it turns out, the writers did this because if they had actually shown this development and given the characters some personality, we might not have bought it when Stefan just turns into a complete monster for no reason.
See, after that kiss on Mal’s birthday, Stefan just up and left her for reasons the movie doesn’t explain. Back in the Evil Kingdom of Evil, there’s this asshole king who hates Fairyland because…yeah, that’s another thing the movie doesn’t explain. He seems to hate it just because it’s there and not his. Anyway, the asshole king tries to attack the ASCOSAM, and he gets humiliated in the process because a now fully-grown Mal, played by Angelina Jolie’s cheekbones, delivers him a beatdown alongside her tree spirit minions. (For people with no established ruler, these spirit dudes seem awfully willing to lay down their spirit lives just because Maleficent tells them to.) To the movie’s credit, this is a really well-done battle scene. The king and his foot soldiers don’t stand a chance once Mal swoops in and gives them what-for with her big-ass bird wings. It gave me some anticipatory hope for even cooler battle scenes once Maleficent went full-on evil. Which she’s gonna do, right, movie? Right?
Anyway, the king is pissed because Maleficent handed him his ass, and as he lays dying, he promises the throne to anyone who can “avenge” him, by which he means take the bitch down. She really did him some wrong by…defending her home against a completely unprovoked attack? Yeah, this character has no motivation and makes no sense, he’s just a zero-dimensional mega-jerk. Stefan, as it turns out, has gone from being a peasant orphan to one of the king’s top minions (how this happened, we’ll never know - it’s one of the many things the movie leaves unexplained in favor of exposition), and he decides it’s going to be him. Stefan, you see, is very ambitious - ambitious enough to completely and utterly betray the woman he loves for his own gain. We know this, not because he has ever done anything indicating that he is this ambitious, but because the narrator just told us that he is. Thanks, narrator! Glad we solved that problem so easily!
So Stefan goes back to ASCOSAM to say hi to Mal and get on her good side again, and for the first bit of this sequence, it looks like he might actually still be a decent guy: he seems to be there to warn her that the king is after her. Cue the unfolding of one of the most talked-about and screwed-up sequences in the movie.
Stefan and Mal have a great night together, chatting until the wee hours (I’m sure you can guess, at this point, how we know this to be the case), until Stefan offers her some water from a pouch he brought along. But the water was a trap: it was spiked with some kind of magical roofie cocktail that puts her into a deep sleep. But Stefan can’t quite bring himself to kill her, so instead, he cuts off her giant wings and brings them back to the king as “proof” that he killed her. When Mal wakes up, she is understandably heartbroken and devastated. Jolie actually really sells this scene: her sobbing as she discovers how she’s been violated and cast aside is gut-wrenching. It’s evident and believable that this betrayal is going to be the impetus for The Darkening and her transformation into the villainous Malficent.
But.
I see what you did here, Disney.
No one missed the heavy-handed metaphor for a completely different kind of violation that was present in this scene. We are now officially in a rape-revenge story. We are also in a story that is going to try to make a Culturally Relevant Point. I don’t…immediately hate this. The setup to it was atrocious and phony, but what’s done is done. Rape-revenge can be very compelling if it is done well. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I am hesitant about whether it’s going to be anything close to “done well.” But we’re only finishing Act One. There’s time. I loosen my grip on my soda a bit.
Stay tuned for Part III!