Maleficent, Part IV: The New Movie, Act Three
Link to Part I
Link to Part II
Link to Part III
Well, by popular demand, I have returned to finish spending way too much time dissecting this piece-of-shit movie. Enjoy Part IV: The Big Damn Snoozefest of a Climax, with Bonus Rage-Filled Tangents!
In my general fury about everything the filmmakers had done wrong in Act Two, there were a couple of elements I forgot to mention. The main one is that sometime in the mess of Aurora bubbling her merry way around to various locations in order to force the plot along, she met Prince Philip.
Philip, played by someone named Brendan Thwaites, seems to have gotten lost in the former ASCOSAM on the way to his American Idol audition. He and Aurora run into each other and have a thirty-second conversation, most of which involves Aurora giving him directions and both of them making goo-goo eyes at each other. It is a realistic, believable interaction between two teenagers, assuming both teenagers are poorly designed robots that have been cast in a particularly hammy production of West Side Story. Seriously, that’s all they do. There’s no flirting, no dance, no “Once Upon a Dream,” not one hint of anything particularly charming.
And yet, this interaction is enough for everyone who sees it to freak the fuck out about how Philip is obviously Aurora’s true love and is totally going to be the one to break the curse. What they’re actually doing, of course, is dropping anvils on our heads about exactly how much he is not going to be the one to break the curse. I’m kind of pleasantly surprised at the movie’s restraint that the freaking narrator isn’t chiming in to comment on this astonishing development. The only one who doesn’t immediately buy it is Maleficent, and I’m on her side for a change.
This isn’t an accurate representation of the story told in the animated film. This is considerably worse than what happened in the animated film. The people losing their shit over this Aurora and this Philip aren’t being overly sentimental or naïve, they’re just being imbeciles. It would be one thing if their interaction had contained any sort of spark or chemistry (as it actually did in the Disney film), but it did not. I’ve seen more inherent romance in interactions between cops and the people they’re slapping with traffic tickets.
Back to present movie time. Aurora goes running back to the castle and barges in on some business meeting that her long-lost pop is holding. Dad does not at all look pleased to see her, refusing to even return her hug, and fumes for a bit about the incompetent fairies and how Aurora needs to be hidden. Well, I sure am glad that you have so much invested in your daughter, dude, because otherwise, this entire plot would seem really, really contrived. Like, way more contrived than Sleeping Beauty.
In the former ASCOSAM, Maleficent and Diaval are in full-on hang-wringing mode when they once again come across Phil, who never did manage to figure out where he was going. Diaval persuades Maleficent to at least give it a chance: after all, she only knows how she feels about True Love, and not how Aurora feels. This completely reasonable point could have been a poignant and touching moment of character development for Maleficent, if this movie believed in character development, and if we had seen a shred of evidence that Phil and Aurora felt any emotions towards each other.
Maleficent is convinced, though, and she steps out of the shadows to have a forthright chat with this young man, explaining that while she understands that he doesn’t really know the young lady he was talking to a little while ago, she’s in big trouble, and he’s the only semblance of hope they have to get her out of it, so would he mind coming along with her and Crow Boy to Stefan’s castle and they’ll explain everything on the yes I’m completely making all of this up.
No, actually, she turns Diaval into a horse (totally without his consent, per usual), magically conks Philip out, and drags him and his horse behind her all the way to the castle, without giving him a single clue as to what they are doing. What the hell, movie? Narrator! Narrator, can we get an explanation for why that was necessary at all? No? Sigh. Fine, let’s just get to the damn castle and get this over with so I can watch Maleficent turn into a fucking dragon and fix this mess. They can’t not turn her into a dragon, right? There’s a law or something.
Meantime, back in the castle, the inevitable happens. Aurora falls under some kind of hypnosis that leads her to a spinning wheel and forces her to touch the spindle, fulfilling the curse. In the animated film, she had been following Maleficent’s voice, but in this version, the curse itself seems to be leading her on. I don’t mind this change, honestly. In either case, the premise of the curse was kind of weird, and it’s carried out in a way that builds up the sense of dread about as well as we’d expect in this kind of story. No complaints about this sequence. Moving right along.
Next scene, Stefan and the obnoxious fairies are hanging out at Aurora’s bedside. Stefan, whose motivations other than just being a dick are still entirely unclear seventy-five percent of the way into the movie, does not appear at all perturbed that his daughter is dead, for all intents and purposes, and is mainly annoyed that Maleficent has won their sixteen-year pissing contest. He orders the fairies to fix it and storms off huffily to make sure Maleficent doesn’t win anymore. It’s an empty, pointless scene.
Maleficent and Diaval arrive with their hapless prisoner and unceremoniously dump him in Aurora’s room. But first, they have to get through the crazy iron net that Stefan’s smiths have built all over the castle! Oh no! Given Maleficent’s severe allergy to iron, this is sure to be difficult…
Yeah, the iron stings her a few times, but it never presents any serious threats. Once again, the stakes in this movie are lower than the Dead Sea. But they dump him off, he wakes up and has no idea where he is, and then the fairies descend on him.
What follows is a scene that makes me so angry that some of my vital organs are in danger, so I’m going to get very comfortable before I write about it. Pajamas, blanket, calming tea, bowl of ice cream. Ready to go.
The three goddamn fairies who will not go away even when they have become completely irrelevant shove Philip over to Aurora’s bed and start shouting “Kiss her! Kiss her!” Philip makes some half-assed protestations about how this feels really weird and he doesn’t really know her, but the fairies are all but shoving his mouth down onto hers, so eventually he - this poor kid, who is trying so hard to make something out of this dumbass character - shrugs and gives her a peck. To absolutely no one’s surprise, it doesn’t work, and the fairies very indignantly toss him out of the room on his ass.
What?
All right. I have two major problems with this sequence: the first is a nitpick, and the second is a furious rage. Any savvy moviegoer can tell what the filmmakers were going for here. Aside from the well-known criticisms about Disney-style romances and marriages between teenagers who don’t know really know each other (also used to beat the audience around the head and neck in several other Disney films made since 2007), they’re also addressing a criticism that has come up about kissing sleeping girls without their consent. It’s not a completely invalid point to address, and it would be better to show kids examples of realistic, well-developed, mutually respectful relationships.
But it’s not a valid criticism of Sleeping Beauty. Hear me out on this one. An often-overlooked detail of the animated film is that after Aurora fell asleep, the three fairies put the rest of the kingdom to sleep as well. The theory was that if they did this, she wouldn’t be all alone when she woke up, and the kingdom wouldn’t have to grieve. So Philip, whether or not he was her True Love, was literally the only hope she had of ever waking up again. I can only speak for myself, but given the choice between a guy I at least kind of like brushing my lips while I’m asleep, and sleeping for the rest of eternity? I’d take the awkward smooch. There is a lot to pick on in the Philip/Aurora relationship: the “dumb bland teenagers who just met have no idea what love looks like” provides plenty of fodder. But in the world they set up, the consent thing kind of gets eclipsed by the only-hope-in-the-entire world issue.
That’s my nitpick. Here’s the (carefully controlled) rage.
That was a really goddamn mean thing you just did. I have never seen a movie targeted at young audiences treat a character as cruelly as this movie just treated Philip. The poor boy is guilty of nothing more than minding his own business, and he has been dragged off to a dangerous castle, forced into kissing some girl that he didn’t want to kiss, and then thrown away. He exists only as a tool, a tool that gets thrown away when he stops working. His not-girlfriend is bland, to be sure, but she’s special or something. He is replaceable and disposable.
I find it very insidious that this movie fancies itself some kind of female-empowerment story. But it hasn’t done a damn thing to empower a single female character, unless someone changed the definition of “empowerment” to “defanging one of the most powerful female characters in film history.” The only reason these women look “empowered” is because the men around them suck so much.
You want to talk about bad messages to send to kids? I see one right here: boys are either humongous jerks or spineless patsies. You should never trust them unless you can control them. That’s no better a message to send than the one that girls are passive and need to be saved all the time. You didn’t move forward. You moved sideways. And fuck you for trying to claim otherwise.
So after that bursting of the blood vessels in my forehead, we get the movie’s Big Twist. If you’ve seen Frozen, you’ve already seen the Big Twist, and you’ve seen it done better and with more sincerity. The True Love’s Kiss that breaks the curse is Maleficent’s kissing Aurora on her forehead and promising to protect her sleeping corpse always and forever. Yeah, Maleficent did that. You know, this person:
Nothing I say can make this any more ridiculous than it is.
Oh, but we’re not done! We have to have a long, drawn-out battle scene, because - why, exactly? The curse is broken, Aurora’s fine, no one has anything to be fighting about anymore, except, oh right, Maleficent and Stefan are still in an eternal cycle of revenge and it’s still not interesting. Stefan drops an iron net on her and starts beating the shit out of her with a bunch of minions dressed in iron armor. Wow, that actually looks like it hurts. Hey Mal, now seems like it would be a good time to do that thing where you -
She turns Diaval into the dragon.
She turns Diaval into the dragon.
SHE FUCKING TURNS HER FUCKING SIDEKICK INTO THE DRAGON.
I will let Caputo speak for me on this one.
(image credit: dystopianplanet)
SHE DOESN’T EVEN GET TO TURN INTO THE DRAGON HERSELF? That’s it. You’re dead to me, movie. If I weren’t such a generally respectful person, I would chuck whatever’s left of my soda at the screen right now. At this point, my housemate and I are both just cracking up, because the other options for reactions would be letting the movie get the better of us. I’ve already given the movie way, way more than it deserves by writing up this novel of a review, but I wanted to put off cleaning my room and writing my syllabus.
In the climax of the battle, Aurora sneaks off to the room where Stefan keeps Maleficent’s wings as a trophy. They are apparently sentient - unsurprisingly, this has never been indicated before - and when she breaks the cabinet, they fly off and reattach themselves to Maleficent’s back. She throws Stefan off a tower, everyone is happy again, and Aurora gets to be the new Anarcho-Syndicalist Elect of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune of Sunshine and Marshmallows That Still Looks Suspiciously Like a Kingdom. The narrator, who only chimes in when she isn’t useful, tells us that she’s actually Old Lady Aurora, and that Maleficent was “both hero and villain.” She was neither. Housemate and I agree that we need to go watch The Little Mermaid for some villain therapy.
But wait, there’s more! I still have paperwork I don’t want to deal with, so there will be one more installment! Stay tuned for Part V: Conclusions!
Link to Part II
Link to Part III
Well, by popular demand, I have returned to finish spending way too much time dissecting this piece-of-shit movie. Enjoy Part IV: The Big Damn Snoozefest of a Climax, with Bonus Rage-Filled Tangents!
In my general fury about everything the filmmakers had done wrong in Act Two, there were a couple of elements I forgot to mention. The main one is that sometime in the mess of Aurora bubbling her merry way around to various locations in order to force the plot along, she met Prince Philip.
Philip, played by someone named Brendan Thwaites, seems to have gotten lost in the former ASCOSAM on the way to his American Idol audition. He and Aurora run into each other and have a thirty-second conversation, most of which involves Aurora giving him directions and both of them making goo-goo eyes at each other. It is a realistic, believable interaction between two teenagers, assuming both teenagers are poorly designed robots that have been cast in a particularly hammy production of West Side Story. Seriously, that’s all they do. There’s no flirting, no dance, no “Once Upon a Dream,” not one hint of anything particularly charming.
And yet, this interaction is enough for everyone who sees it to freak the fuck out about how Philip is obviously Aurora’s true love and is totally going to be the one to break the curse. What they’re actually doing, of course, is dropping anvils on our heads about exactly how much he is not going to be the one to break the curse. I’m kind of pleasantly surprised at the movie’s restraint that the freaking narrator isn’t chiming in to comment on this astonishing development. The only one who doesn’t immediately buy it is Maleficent, and I’m on her side for a change.
This isn’t an accurate representation of the story told in the animated film. This is considerably worse than what happened in the animated film. The people losing their shit over this Aurora and this Philip aren’t being overly sentimental or naïve, they’re just being imbeciles. It would be one thing if their interaction had contained any sort of spark or chemistry (as it actually did in the Disney film), but it did not. I’ve seen more inherent romance in interactions between cops and the people they’re slapping with traffic tickets.
Back to present movie time. Aurora goes running back to the castle and barges in on some business meeting that her long-lost pop is holding. Dad does not at all look pleased to see her, refusing to even return her hug, and fumes for a bit about the incompetent fairies and how Aurora needs to be hidden. Well, I sure am glad that you have so much invested in your daughter, dude, because otherwise, this entire plot would seem really, really contrived. Like, way more contrived than Sleeping Beauty.
In the former ASCOSAM, Maleficent and Diaval are in full-on hang-wringing mode when they once again come across Phil, who never did manage to figure out where he was going. Diaval persuades Maleficent to at least give it a chance: after all, she only knows how she feels about True Love, and not how Aurora feels. This completely reasonable point could have been a poignant and touching moment of character development for Maleficent, if this movie believed in character development, and if we had seen a shred of evidence that Phil and Aurora felt any emotions towards each other.
Maleficent is convinced, though, and she steps out of the shadows to have a forthright chat with this young man, explaining that while she understands that he doesn’t really know the young lady he was talking to a little while ago, she’s in big trouble, and he’s the only semblance of hope they have to get her out of it, so would he mind coming along with her and Crow Boy to Stefan’s castle and they’ll explain everything on the yes I’m completely making all of this up.
No, actually, she turns Diaval into a horse (totally without his consent, per usual), magically conks Philip out, and drags him and his horse behind her all the way to the castle, without giving him a single clue as to what they are doing. What the hell, movie? Narrator! Narrator, can we get an explanation for why that was necessary at all? No? Sigh. Fine, let’s just get to the damn castle and get this over with so I can watch Maleficent turn into a fucking dragon and fix this mess. They can’t not turn her into a dragon, right? There’s a law or something.
Meantime, back in the castle, the inevitable happens. Aurora falls under some kind of hypnosis that leads her to a spinning wheel and forces her to touch the spindle, fulfilling the curse. In the animated film, she had been following Maleficent’s voice, but in this version, the curse itself seems to be leading her on. I don’t mind this change, honestly. In either case, the premise of the curse was kind of weird, and it’s carried out in a way that builds up the sense of dread about as well as we’d expect in this kind of story. No complaints about this sequence. Moving right along.
Next scene, Stefan and the obnoxious fairies are hanging out at Aurora’s bedside. Stefan, whose motivations other than just being a dick are still entirely unclear seventy-five percent of the way into the movie, does not appear at all perturbed that his daughter is dead, for all intents and purposes, and is mainly annoyed that Maleficent has won their sixteen-year pissing contest. He orders the fairies to fix it and storms off huffily to make sure Maleficent doesn’t win anymore. It’s an empty, pointless scene.
Maleficent and Diaval arrive with their hapless prisoner and unceremoniously dump him in Aurora’s room. But first, they have to get through the crazy iron net that Stefan’s smiths have built all over the castle! Oh no! Given Maleficent’s severe allergy to iron, this is sure to be difficult…
Yeah, the iron stings her a few times, but it never presents any serious threats. Once again, the stakes in this movie are lower than the Dead Sea. But they dump him off, he wakes up and has no idea where he is, and then the fairies descend on him.
What follows is a scene that makes me so angry that some of my vital organs are in danger, so I’m going to get very comfortable before I write about it. Pajamas, blanket, calming tea, bowl of ice cream. Ready to go.
The three goddamn fairies who will not go away even when they have become completely irrelevant shove Philip over to Aurora’s bed and start shouting “Kiss her! Kiss her!” Philip makes some half-assed protestations about how this feels really weird and he doesn’t really know her, but the fairies are all but shoving his mouth down onto hers, so eventually he - this poor kid, who is trying so hard to make something out of this dumbass character - shrugs and gives her a peck. To absolutely no one’s surprise, it doesn’t work, and the fairies very indignantly toss him out of the room on his ass.
What?
All right. I have two major problems with this sequence: the first is a nitpick, and the second is a furious rage. Any savvy moviegoer can tell what the filmmakers were going for here. Aside from the well-known criticisms about Disney-style romances and marriages between teenagers who don’t know really know each other (also used to beat the audience around the head and neck in several other Disney films made since 2007), they’re also addressing a criticism that has come up about kissing sleeping girls without their consent. It’s not a completely invalid point to address, and it would be better to show kids examples of realistic, well-developed, mutually respectful relationships.
But it’s not a valid criticism of Sleeping Beauty. Hear me out on this one. An often-overlooked detail of the animated film is that after Aurora fell asleep, the three fairies put the rest of the kingdom to sleep as well. The theory was that if they did this, she wouldn’t be all alone when she woke up, and the kingdom wouldn’t have to grieve. So Philip, whether or not he was her True Love, was literally the only hope she had of ever waking up again. I can only speak for myself, but given the choice between a guy I at least kind of like brushing my lips while I’m asleep, and sleeping for the rest of eternity? I’d take the awkward smooch. There is a lot to pick on in the Philip/Aurora relationship: the “dumb bland teenagers who just met have no idea what love looks like” provides plenty of fodder. But in the world they set up, the consent thing kind of gets eclipsed by the only-hope-in-the-entire world issue.
That’s my nitpick. Here’s the (carefully controlled) rage.
That was a really goddamn mean thing you just did. I have never seen a movie targeted at young audiences treat a character as cruelly as this movie just treated Philip. The poor boy is guilty of nothing more than minding his own business, and he has been dragged off to a dangerous castle, forced into kissing some girl that he didn’t want to kiss, and then thrown away. He exists only as a tool, a tool that gets thrown away when he stops working. His not-girlfriend is bland, to be sure, but she’s special or something. He is replaceable and disposable.
I find it very insidious that this movie fancies itself some kind of female-empowerment story. But it hasn’t done a damn thing to empower a single female character, unless someone changed the definition of “empowerment” to “defanging one of the most powerful female characters in film history.” The only reason these women look “empowered” is because the men around them suck so much.
You want to talk about bad messages to send to kids? I see one right here: boys are either humongous jerks or spineless patsies. You should never trust them unless you can control them. That’s no better a message to send than the one that girls are passive and need to be saved all the time. You didn’t move forward. You moved sideways. And fuck you for trying to claim otherwise.
So after that bursting of the blood vessels in my forehead, we get the movie’s Big Twist. If you’ve seen Frozen, you’ve already seen the Big Twist, and you’ve seen it done better and with more sincerity. The True Love’s Kiss that breaks the curse is Maleficent’s kissing Aurora on her forehead and promising to protect her sleeping corpse always and forever. Yeah, Maleficent did that. You know, this person:
Click to viewNothing I say can make this any more ridiculous than it is.
Oh, but we’re not done! We have to have a long, drawn-out battle scene, because - why, exactly? The curse is broken, Aurora’s fine, no one has anything to be fighting about anymore, except, oh right, Maleficent and Stefan are still in an eternal cycle of revenge and it’s still not interesting. Stefan drops an iron net on her and starts beating the shit out of her with a bunch of minions dressed in iron armor. Wow, that actually looks like it hurts. Hey Mal, now seems like it would be a good time to do that thing where you -
She turns Diaval into the dragon.
She turns Diaval into the dragon.
SHE FUCKING TURNS HER FUCKING SIDEKICK INTO THE DRAGON.
I will let Caputo speak for me on this one.
(image credit: dystopianplanet)
SHE DOESN’T EVEN GET TO TURN INTO THE DRAGON HERSELF? That’s it. You’re dead to me, movie. If I weren’t such a generally respectful person, I would chuck whatever’s left of my soda at the screen right now. At this point, my housemate and I are both just cracking up, because the other options for reactions would be letting the movie get the better of us. I’ve already given the movie way, way more than it deserves by writing up this novel of a review, but I wanted to put off cleaning my room and writing my syllabus.
In the climax of the battle, Aurora sneaks off to the room where Stefan keeps Maleficent’s wings as a trophy. They are apparently sentient - unsurprisingly, this has never been indicated before - and when she breaks the cabinet, they fly off and reattach themselves to Maleficent’s back. She throws Stefan off a tower, everyone is happy again, and Aurora gets to be the new Anarcho-Syndicalist Elect of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune of Sunshine and Marshmallows That Still Looks Suspiciously Like a Kingdom. The narrator, who only chimes in when she isn’t useful, tells us that she’s actually Old Lady Aurora, and that Maleficent was “both hero and villain.” She was neither. Housemate and I agree that we need to go watch The Little Mermaid for some villain therapy.
But wait, there’s more! I still have paperwork I don’t want to deal with, so there will be one more installment! Stay tuned for Part V: Conclusions!