With the trailers for Maleficent: Mistress of Evilplaying in theaters and online prompting some interest from me I decided it was time to see the 2014 feature starring Angelina Jolie.

According to the Wikipedia entry the script for Maleficentwent through 15 drafts and in my opinion it needed 15 more.

The movie is a retelling of Sleeping Beautybut centering the story on the original’s villain, Maleficent. Beginning with a ponderous voiceover narration that suffers from all the worst aspects of prologs the film laboriously goes through the motion of establishing its central characters motivation but devoid of any real characterization. A good half of the movie is spent just establishing elements that have no emotional weight. This is made worse by sub-standard CGI that extends the ‘uncanny valley’ from characters to actual valleys, as the virtual sets never allow a full suspension of disbelief.

Perhaps most damning is that Maleficent herself is a terribly passive character. Yes they give her villainy a reason but she has no goals in the film, there is nothing that she is desperate to achieve and no consequence of failure. By the time the film rolled into its third act I found it impossible to care about the curse, the fairies, or anything at all taking place on the screen. And rather than give us an evil character with understandable motivations and goal Maleficentends with redemption making the transition to the sequel problematic. As with Alien 3you can only get to the sequel by insisting that anyone who did invested emotionally with the previous story were suckers. A sequel should never put the audience in the position of having to discard what they cared for in the previous installments.