For some reason, a suit at Disney decided that their finest "evil for the sake of evil" villainess - Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) from Sleeping Beauty - needed a ridiculous backstory.
It turns out that she's actually just misunderstood, a victim of male oppression striking back for the sake of equality, and is really a decent fairy who ultimately decides that Sleeping Beauty is a good egg and shouldn't be cursed... but then finds out it's too late to lift the curse!
There are just so many missteps in this film I'm amazed it could find its way to the cinema: for instance, Aurora aka Sleeping Beauty (Elle Fanning) is only asleep for about five minutes and the cartoon's spectacular climax of the witch transforming into a dragon is undercut by Maleficent, instead, transforming her henchman, Diaval (Sam Riley), into the dragon.
Such a pity. I had high hopes for this fantasy, but Disney managed to strip everything so iconic about the original Sleeping Beauty villainess and reduce her to a bland, cookie cutter "anti-hero".
I'd put this on a par with the pointless reinvention of The Wicked Witch of The West in Wicked. These are fairy tales, the bad guys are just bad because they enjoy being bad (and probably have a #bad4life tattoo). They don't need to be "understood". They need to be overcome.
Well. As you can imagine, I rather loved this movie. I am a fan of Jolie and the Maleficent character. I did think it was a told retelling to be honest. And I liked Elle Fanning in it too. Was thinking of rewatching it just last weekend.
ReplyDeleteFair enough. As I always say: it would be a dull world if we all liked the same things (except, you know, world peace... we should all be in favour of that).
DeleteI totally get your "if you want Sleeping Beauty, watch Sleeping Beauty" point, but I still like my fairy tale "evil" characters to be wholly, cartoonishly even, evil - without the need to justify anything 😉