A year and half ago, while aimlessly scrolling through my Tumblr dash I came upon a movie poster of Angelina Jolie with her face towards the sky sporting lips red as blood, milky white skin, and razor sharp cheekbones. The actress also wore iconic horns on her head that immediately brough one name to my mind: Maleficent.
As a proud child of the 90’s, I owned all of the Disney classics on VHS, of course! As I became older and revisited these stories, I became less interested in the princesses and more interested in the villains. The one villain that I feared the most was Maleficent from “Sleeping Beauty.” Her long black cloak, the sharp horns on top of her head, and the green smoke that seemed to follow her everywhere made her chilling yet entertaining. The way she would command attention whenever she walked in the room was something I admired. She was everything I was not, my polar opposite, and I loved it.
When I heard that Disney was making a movie based on this character the only thing I wished was for them to keep her the same, but we all know Disney.
“Maleficent” is a story that is set in a fantasy world brought to us by CGI (think “Oz The Great and Powerful”). In this story, there are two realms – one human and one magical – but both lands are visually stunning. From the beginning of the tale we’re brought into the magical forest of the Moors where fairies and other enchanted creatures live side by side. Although Maleficent is a live action character, she does occasionally look out of place amongst the CGI characters. It should come to no surprise that Jolie plays a villain effortlessly. From the voice she created to the sharpness of her prosthetic cheekbones, she was flawless. In the iconic scene where Maleficent curses Princess Aurora, Jolie is absolutely breathtaking as she crashes her ex-lover’s daughter’s christening. In this scene Jolie makes all of Disney’s other villains look like Mickey Mouse.
No matter how dazzling the visuals and score of a movie are, viewers are not going to connect to a story if the acting is not up to par. Unfortunately, this was the case for me. Besides Jolie, all the other characters were just…eh. Elle Fanning, who plays Princess Aurora, seemed to be in a dream-like wonderment whenever she was on screen. It all felt very “Alice in Wonderland;” she was bright eyed and innocent with a lot of the same qualities young Maleficent actress Isabelle Molloy brought to the screen. In her defense, her characteristics stayed true to the original cartoon’s plot line.
Shartlo Copley plays King Stefan, Maleficent’s first-love-turned-enemy. Copley was not believable as the deranged king who was once worthy of such a powerful women’s love. He spends most of the film paranoid that the villain will kill him or his daughter. The three fairies ordered to protect Aurora, played by Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, and Juno Temple, were put in for comedic timing but if you are over the age of twelve you probably will not find their pranks and jokes very funny. However, Maleficent’s trusty confidant, man-crow Diaval, played by Sam Riley, was entertaining to watch. Watching him transform into a human, crow, and dragon is a treat thanks to the visuals team.
Keeping true to Disney’s brand, a morality tale sneaks into this dark fantasy, straying away from the cartoon’s original story. Prince Phillip’s romantic “true love’s kiss” does not break the curse. (I mean how could it? They’ve literally only exchanged four sentences between each other in their entire lives.) Instead, it is love the maternal love between Maleficent and Aurora that breaks the curse. Now don’t get me wrong, I love that Disney is putting emphasis on the importance of non-romantic relationships, but didn’t we JUST see this? Which leads me to my final point…
My biggest disappointment with this movie is the plot. Disney had the chance to really do something with this movie, and they totally missed it. It wasn’t unbearable to watch but at times the plot felt inconsistent and left viewers with a lot of questions due to holes in the story.
While I appreciate Disney for taking the “Frozen” route with their ending, which was obviously successful in its own right, allowing Maleficent’s kiss to be the “true love’s kiss” that awakens Aurora contradicts the villain’s broken heart. I’m a little disappointed because Disney took one of their evilest villains and gave her a storyline right out of “Wicked.” It’s a story we’ve seen before but with different characters, which is doubly disappointing considering how “Maleficent” was marketed to be a story we had never heard before. This movie would have been so much better if they would have let Maleficent be evil. Jolie was perfect in the one scene she had the chance to be wicked in. What disappoints me the most is that Disney felt that they needed to make our villain likeable by giving her this fairy tale background. They failed to realize that people already loved Maleficent just the way she was.
The movie was cute, but not magnificent. I’m glad I saw it but I won’t be adding it to my Disney collection any time soon.