Maleficent, Part III: The New Movie, Act Two
Link to Part I
Link to Part II
And now enjoy Part III: The New Movie, Act Two, or: The Part Where Very Little of Any Substance Happens.
Act II
Unfortunately, Maleficent joins the ranks of films like When a Stranger Calls and Full Metal Jacket that frontloaded all of their best material. Unlike Stranger and Jacket, which are okay films that would have been masterpieces if the filmmakers had slapped “The End” on them after Act One, Maleficent just would have been less horrifyingly bad if it had quit while it was ahead. But it would still have been an improvement, because Act Two is where things really start to get stupid.
We see Mal’s transformation into The Evil Maleficent, and like many things in this movie, it looks really cool. Kudos to the art direction team. It also works pretty well on its own, as a sequence: Stefan took away something that was precious to her, but he didn’t invalidate her by any means. She turns the entire ASCOSAM into the Land of Doom and Gloom with a couple sweeps of her cloak, and the first hint of an evil thing that she does is basically subjugating all the Fairyland creatures to her drive for revenge. My Hope-o-Meter’s dial jumped to the right a bit as I watched this sequence.
What’s bothering me throughout, though, is that what had been explored about her personality - her fierceness, her protectiveness of her homeland, her romantic side - has been scrapped, replaced by nothing but ‘round-the-clock anger and hatred. Which, you know, fine, if that’s what you’re going for, but that isn’t what you promised to do. You promised to complicate the character. The change is jarring, and is not helped by the fact that it is facilitated entirely via - you guessed it - the goddamn omnipresent frigging intrusive narrator. Y’all. I paid $10 to see a movie, not hear an abridged audiobook.
Oh, she also picks up a sidekick. He’s a crow named Diaval (what was wrong with Diablo? This is reminiscent of the name changes from The Mists of Avalon) that she saves from a trap, and he offers to be her servant in return. What he’s actually signing up to do is be turned into whatever animal she wants - human, horse, dog, you name it - whenever she wants, with no regard for what he wants at the time. This, too, is an interesting progression of evil, because the body-warping-against-victim’s-will thing is so close to what she herself went through. It could have been a surprisingly mature exploration of the prey becoming the predator - something that, very sadly, happens to many real victims of abuse (it’s never actually explored in any depth). But I am a little confused as to why Stefan’s violation of Maleficent was supposed to be an act of irredeemable evil, but we’re still supposed to root for Maleficent after she does it repeatedly to Diaval. I dunno, it’s a relatively small thing, but it bothered me. Consistency, writers. It’s not just for cookie dough.
One fine day in the Dark Dictatorship that Maleficent has built for herself, Diaval drops in to tell Maleficent some happy news: now-King Stefan and his blander-than-British-cuisine nondescript wife have had a baby! There’s going to be a christening! We’ve arrived at the starting point of the source material! Maleficent decides this sounds like a great time for some sweet, sweet revenge, so she goes to crash the party.
In the animated film, the entire spectacle gets spurred because Maleficent is mad that she wasn’t invited to the baby’s christening party. It has always struck people, correctly, as a really odd motivation: it makes her entire plot seem like the world’s most insane overreaction to a snub. I’ve always liked it for that reason: Maleficent is, after all, the Mistress of All Evil. We could call pettiness a form of evil. The party invitation thing always felt to me like a convenient, calculated excuse to show up and wreak havoc. It worked just fine for the character.
Well, now Maleficent has a much edgier and angrier motivation to show up and make shit go down, so she does. She confronts King Stefan and the queen, this poor hapless woman who has no idea who the hell she is. Oh, and the three good fairies are also there. This is as good a time as any to talk about them.
These goddamn fairies are so goddamn annoying. These writers broke them. Everything that made them charming and fun from the original has been scrapped. They’re poorly designed (big balloon actress heads on shrunken CG bodies), squeaky, sniveling, incompetent, and inconsequential. The “inconsequential” part irritates me a LOT. Maleficent’s curse, for anyone who has forgotten, was that Aurora would grow up beautiful and beloved, but on her sixteenth birthday, she would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, and die. The catch was that the three good fairies had been in the process of giving the baby their own magical blessings, and the third fairy had been interrupted by Maleficent’s party-crashing. The third fairy couldn’t undo the curse, but she could mitigate it, and she added the provision about a true love’s kiss being able to wake Aurora up.
Now for the changes: in this version, Maleficent herself adds the provision, because she doesn’t believe in True Love’s Kiss. The third sniveling fairy never even gives her gift. In the animated film, Maleficent took genuine pleasure and glee in cursing the baby and tormenting the parents, because that’s the kind of baddie she was; here’s she’s just really angry all the time. It’s understandable, but it’s not interesting or pleasurable to watch. In the animated film, the parents, while not super-compelling, displayed some affection for their baby. Here, the queen just sits there and whimpers, and Stefan just sits there and acts like an ineffectual dick. And still, we’re over forty minutes into the movie at this point, and no one has grown anything resembling a personality. Stefan’s just a dick, Maleficent’s just angry all the time, the fairies are just obnoxious, and the crow dude is…just kind of there. This is what I was afraid was going to happen when I saw that they were going the rape-revenge route: this is an utterly joyless film. No one looks like they’re having any fun, and why should they be? They might as well be at a funeral. Everything around them is lifeless.
So Stefan sends Aurora off into the woods with these three idiot fairies (Jesus, dude, you’re the king, surely there’s someone better than this available). Another thing that is never explained is why the Evil Kingdom of Evil, which is mortal enemies with Fairyland, is totally okay with these three fairies raising their princess, but whatever, minor quibble. Ostensibly, he’s sending her off with them to keep her hidden from Maleficent - which, in the animated movie, actually happens, because the fairies are powerful magical beings who don’t fail at everything they attempt. In this version, not only are the fairies complete dimwits with not the foggiest idea of how to raise a human child, but Maleficent finds her within two minutes of screen time and doesn’t lay a finger on her. Yet another recurring problem with this movie is that there are no stakes to anything. Nearly every problem is solved within five minutes, and the characters go back to doing nothing and having nothing to do.
Maleficent is disgusted by the fairies’ incompetence and starts sort of raising the kid herself from afar: sending her a little flower that produces milk when the idiot fairies can’t figure out how to feed her, watching her from afar, etc. There’s a scene between Maleficent and five-year-old Aurora that’s pretty adorable, compounded by the fact that tiny Aurora is played by Jolie’s real-life daughter. The contrast between Aurora’s fearless childishness and Maleficent’s grudging adoration of the child is very well -
Wait, what?
Maleficent’s grudging adoration of the child?
No. No, no, no. You are not going to re-tell Silas Marner starring Maleficent. Stop right now. Maleficent does not need a magical child to come along and redeem her. Maleficent is the freaking empress of hell. She does the redeeming around here, and she does it with her lightning stick. Oh, fuck me, you are telling this as a redemption-by-motherhood story.
Look, this isn’t necessarily a bad story. I really loved Silas Marner. But Silas Marner worked because Silas was a complex, likeable-despite-many-flaws character and his relationship with his adopted daughter was explored in depth. Here, we’re stuck being ordered to care about the antics of these cardboard cutouts. What’s more, I still wouldn’t think this character had any chops, but I wouldn’t hate her as much if you weren’t trying to pass her off as fucking Maleficent. We go through this with every “remake” and “reboot” Hollywood pukes out: if it ain’t broke, don’t break it.
Anyway, Aurora grows up into a lovely young Elle Fanning (all but about fifteen screen time minutes, by the way, are covered yet again by the narrator). Fanning, God love her, is a seriously talented actor, and she does everything she can to add charm and personality to this otherwise blank slate of a character. Movie, since you were so intent on fixing the original, would it have killed you to, you know, fix the things that could have actually used fixing?
So anyway, there’s some other shit where Aurora thinks Maleficent is her fairy godmother and they start hanging out in the moors and Maleficent tries to revoke the curse but can’t (why the hell not? It’s never explained) and then Aurora wants to go live with Maleficent but instead finds out that Maleficent was the one who cursed her, and now she’s running back to the castle to be with her asshole dad. Her asshole dad, in the meantime, has spent all this time turning into even more of an asshole, refusing to be at his wife’s side while she dies and building this crazy iron net all over his castle hallways to keep Maleficent out. Oh yeah, fairies are allergic to iron. We established that earlier. I don’t care about anyone in this film enough to chuck my soda at them. Maybe things will pick up in Act III: The Big Damn Snoozefest of a Climax.
Stay tuned for Part IV, if you still give a shit after that.
Link to Part II
And now enjoy Part III: The New Movie, Act Two, or: The Part Where Very Little of Any Substance Happens.
Act II
Unfortunately, Maleficent joins the ranks of films like When a Stranger Calls and Full Metal Jacket that frontloaded all of their best material. Unlike Stranger and Jacket, which are okay films that would have been masterpieces if the filmmakers had slapped “The End” on them after Act One, Maleficent just would have been less horrifyingly bad if it had quit while it was ahead. But it would still have been an improvement, because Act Two is where things really start to get stupid.
We see Mal’s transformation into The Evil Maleficent, and like many things in this movie, it looks really cool. Kudos to the art direction team. It also works pretty well on its own, as a sequence: Stefan took away something that was precious to her, but he didn’t invalidate her by any means. She turns the entire ASCOSAM into the Land of Doom and Gloom with a couple sweeps of her cloak, and the first hint of an evil thing that she does is basically subjugating all the Fairyland creatures to her drive for revenge. My Hope-o-Meter’s dial jumped to the right a bit as I watched this sequence.
What’s bothering me throughout, though, is that what had been explored about her personality - her fierceness, her protectiveness of her homeland, her romantic side - has been scrapped, replaced by nothing but ‘round-the-clock anger and hatred. Which, you know, fine, if that’s what you’re going for, but that isn’t what you promised to do. You promised to complicate the character. The change is jarring, and is not helped by the fact that it is facilitated entirely via - you guessed it - the goddamn omnipresent frigging intrusive narrator. Y’all. I paid $10 to see a movie, not hear an abridged audiobook.
Oh, she also picks up a sidekick. He’s a crow named Diaval (what was wrong with Diablo? This is reminiscent of the name changes from The Mists of Avalon) that she saves from a trap, and he offers to be her servant in return. What he’s actually signing up to do is be turned into whatever animal she wants - human, horse, dog, you name it - whenever she wants, with no regard for what he wants at the time. This, too, is an interesting progression of evil, because the body-warping-against-victim’s-will thing is so close to what she herself went through. It could have been a surprisingly mature exploration of the prey becoming the predator - something that, very sadly, happens to many real victims of abuse (it’s never actually explored in any depth). But I am a little confused as to why Stefan’s violation of Maleficent was supposed to be an act of irredeemable evil, but we’re still supposed to root for Maleficent after she does it repeatedly to Diaval. I dunno, it’s a relatively small thing, but it bothered me. Consistency, writers. It’s not just for cookie dough.
One fine day in the Dark Dictatorship that Maleficent has built for herself, Diaval drops in to tell Maleficent some happy news: now-King Stefan and his blander-than-British-cuisine nondescript wife have had a baby! There’s going to be a christening! We’ve arrived at the starting point of the source material! Maleficent decides this sounds like a great time for some sweet, sweet revenge, so she goes to crash the party.
In the animated film, the entire spectacle gets spurred because Maleficent is mad that she wasn’t invited to the baby’s christening party. It has always struck people, correctly, as a really odd motivation: it makes her entire plot seem like the world’s most insane overreaction to a snub. I’ve always liked it for that reason: Maleficent is, after all, the Mistress of All Evil. We could call pettiness a form of evil. The party invitation thing always felt to me like a convenient, calculated excuse to show up and wreak havoc. It worked just fine for the character.
Well, now Maleficent has a much edgier and angrier motivation to show up and make shit go down, so she does. She confronts King Stefan and the queen, this poor hapless woman who has no idea who the hell she is. Oh, and the three good fairies are also there. This is as good a time as any to talk about them.
These goddamn fairies are so goddamn annoying. These writers broke them. Everything that made them charming and fun from the original has been scrapped. They’re poorly designed (big balloon actress heads on shrunken CG bodies), squeaky, sniveling, incompetent, and inconsequential. The “inconsequential” part irritates me a LOT. Maleficent’s curse, for anyone who has forgotten, was that Aurora would grow up beautiful and beloved, but on her sixteenth birthday, she would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, and die. The catch was that the three good fairies had been in the process of giving the baby their own magical blessings, and the third fairy had been interrupted by Maleficent’s party-crashing. The third fairy couldn’t undo the curse, but she could mitigate it, and she added the provision about a true love’s kiss being able to wake Aurora up.
Now for the changes: in this version, Maleficent herself adds the provision, because she doesn’t believe in True Love’s Kiss. The third sniveling fairy never even gives her gift. In the animated film, Maleficent took genuine pleasure and glee in cursing the baby and tormenting the parents, because that’s the kind of baddie she was; here’s she’s just really angry all the time. It’s understandable, but it’s not interesting or pleasurable to watch. In the animated film, the parents, while not super-compelling, displayed some affection for their baby. Here, the queen just sits there and whimpers, and Stefan just sits there and acts like an ineffectual dick. And still, we’re over forty minutes into the movie at this point, and no one has grown anything resembling a personality. Stefan’s just a dick, Maleficent’s just angry all the time, the fairies are just obnoxious, and the crow dude is…just kind of there. This is what I was afraid was going to happen when I saw that they were going the rape-revenge route: this is an utterly joyless film. No one looks like they’re having any fun, and why should they be? They might as well be at a funeral. Everything around them is lifeless.
So Stefan sends Aurora off into the woods with these three idiot fairies (Jesus, dude, you’re the king, surely there’s someone better than this available). Another thing that is never explained is why the Evil Kingdom of Evil, which is mortal enemies with Fairyland, is totally okay with these three fairies raising their princess, but whatever, minor quibble. Ostensibly, he’s sending her off with them to keep her hidden from Maleficent - which, in the animated movie, actually happens, because the fairies are powerful magical beings who don’t fail at everything they attempt. In this version, not only are the fairies complete dimwits with not the foggiest idea of how to raise a human child, but Maleficent finds her within two minutes of screen time and doesn’t lay a finger on her. Yet another recurring problem with this movie is that there are no stakes to anything. Nearly every problem is solved within five minutes, and the characters go back to doing nothing and having nothing to do.
Maleficent is disgusted by the fairies’ incompetence and starts sort of raising the kid herself from afar: sending her a little flower that produces milk when the idiot fairies can’t figure out how to feed her, watching her from afar, etc. There’s a scene between Maleficent and five-year-old Aurora that’s pretty adorable, compounded by the fact that tiny Aurora is played by Jolie’s real-life daughter. The contrast between Aurora’s fearless childishness and Maleficent’s grudging adoration of the child is very well -
Wait, what?
Maleficent’s grudging adoration of the child?
No. No, no, no. You are not going to re-tell Silas Marner starring Maleficent. Stop right now. Maleficent does not need a magical child to come along and redeem her. Maleficent is the freaking empress of hell. She does the redeeming around here, and she does it with her lightning stick. Oh, fuck me, you are telling this as a redemption-by-motherhood story.
Look, this isn’t necessarily a bad story. I really loved Silas Marner. But Silas Marner worked because Silas was a complex, likeable-despite-many-flaws character and his relationship with his adopted daughter was explored in depth. Here, we’re stuck being ordered to care about the antics of these cardboard cutouts. What’s more, I still wouldn’t think this character had any chops, but I wouldn’t hate her as much if you weren’t trying to pass her off as fucking Maleficent. We go through this with every “remake” and “reboot” Hollywood pukes out: if it ain’t broke, don’t break it.
Anyway, Aurora grows up into a lovely young Elle Fanning (all but about fifteen screen time minutes, by the way, are covered yet again by the narrator). Fanning, God love her, is a seriously talented actor, and she does everything she can to add charm and personality to this otherwise blank slate of a character. Movie, since you were so intent on fixing the original, would it have killed you to, you know, fix the things that could have actually used fixing?
So anyway, there’s some other shit where Aurora thinks Maleficent is her fairy godmother and they start hanging out in the moors and Maleficent tries to revoke the curse but can’t (why the hell not? It’s never explained) and then Aurora wants to go live with Maleficent but instead finds out that Maleficent was the one who cursed her, and now she’s running back to the castle to be with her asshole dad. Her asshole dad, in the meantime, has spent all this time turning into even more of an asshole, refusing to be at his wife’s side while she dies and building this crazy iron net all over his castle hallways to keep Maleficent out. Oh yeah, fairies are allergic to iron. We established that earlier. I don’t care about anyone in this film enough to chuck my soda at them. Maybe things will pick up in Act III: The Big Damn Snoozefest of a Climax.
Stay tuned for Part IV, if you still give a shit after that.