Why I Saw It: It's been a while since I've seen Angelina on screen and I'm curious to track Elle Fanning's career trajectory*.
*That girl already has 40 credits to her name. That's absurd!
Cast: Do you like Angelina Jolie? If so, here you go. She returns to the screen after a few years in a big way. She is, expectedly, all over this thing. Sure. There's some other characters. Elle Fanning is a completely bland (not her fault) Aurora. Sharlto Copley is a comically badly developed antagonist. Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, and Juno Temple are some annoying fairies. Even Brenton Thwaites is kind enough to show up and be ignored to make a thematic point. None of them matter because they aren't Angelina Jolie. Jolie is...not bad. Let's put it this way. She is the only actress I can imagine playing this role well, so in that respect, she matched my expectations.
Plot: You're familiar with Sleeping Beauty, right? Ok. Gut that like a fish so that all you have is the spine. Now, use that fish spine to try and rebuild it as a cat. Uncomfortable, right? That's this movie in a nutshell. I get the sense that someone had an agenda and a vague story, then someone else said "Hey, can you fit that around the Sleeping Beauty story?". To which, the response was an enthusiastic "Not comfortably". The movie really wants to tell the story from Maleficent's perspective, but as a protagonist. I think the goal was to make her 50/50 good/evil, but it's more of a 90/10 split. I mean, she curses Aurora to get back at the king (why she didn't curse the king instead of the daughter he has no interest in, I'll never know) and then proceeds to do nothing but watch over her for the next 16 years. Oh, and this movie's Aurora is more like "Napping Beauty". She's out for about a day. If you are going to do a reimagining from a new perspective, it should feel like that: a perspective. This is a complete edit of the story that only keeps enough points (like the pricking of the finger, which couldn't've felt more out of place) to make it recognizable without putting in the effort to make it clever.
Elephant in the Room: Disney is trying to distance itself from the Disney Princess, huh? This is a good thing. For years, Disney's bread and butter was tales of the princess who gets saved by the prince. That's antiquated a shit and they've been taking a PR beating over it for years. So, they gave us Brave. Then, we get Frozen. Now, they are doing a post-facto edit of one of the classics. I'm starting to wonder if they are being a little too obvious about it, but I'd rather have obvious than ignoring it.
To Sum Things Up:
I was not impressed. Angelina Jolie is a great choice for the role, but it's like all the effort went into the casting and none to the script. There's a number of "wouldn't this look cool" moments and a couple tweaks of classic tropes but nothing all that interesting about it. The movie reminded me a lot of the Beowolf movie that Jolie was in, in which so many of the beats of the story were changed that it was nearly unrecognizable from the source material (Referring to the movie, not the grimm fairy tale, in the case of Sleeping Beauty). The more time I have to think about the movie, the less impressed I am of it.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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