When
you make a prequel of a strong movie that’s become embedded in culture,
there are two things you really need to look at. One is the thematic
nature of that piece. Certain stories have either powerful themes, or a
very tropic nature. Star Trek stories are all about exploring new places with a group of friends. Star Wars is heavily about the choice between the easy, destructive way, and the struggle to build up. Frankenstein
is about the dangers of playing God and of taking things at face value.
If you don’t take into account these things, you fail the original
piece.
The second group of things you need to take into account in a prequel are the solid facts. A Firefly prequel that ignored the war between the Independents and the Alliance or an X-Men prequel that didn’t show the lifelong friendship between Professor X and Magneto would be completely missing the point.
It is on these grounds that Oz, the Great and Powerful must be judged, in addition to the simpler yet even more important grounds of a good film. Oz is a prequel to the classic story Wizard of Oz, better known as the first live action colored film. Unlike its predecessor, The Great and Powerful
is not a snuff film, which I suppose ought to be celebrated; if anybody
hung themselves in the making of this picture, the editing team seems
to have caught it.
Now
that you’ve chuckled awkwardly at the morbid humor of a twisted
individual, let’s look at the film. I considered starting with the
script, but ultimately, that’s not the first thing you see here. No,
the first thing you see is the actors, and the visuals. In terms of the
acting, while I agree it’s not exactly Oscar-worthy, I do think the
acting is exactly what you would expect given that exact cast. Zach
Braff plays JD, a role he’s played in a different setting for years. I
would find it perfectly acceptable if someone stated that Frank’s last
name was Dorian, because in fiction both personality and appearance have
a strong chance of carrying almost unaltered down a family line.
Rachel Weisz as Evanora and James Franco as Oz were brilliant. As for
Kunis and Williams, I’ll discuss them a bit later, when I talk about the
script.
As
for the visual style of this film, I’m not a fan. There’s something to
be said about prequels that were obviously made decades after the
original. Sometimes you can overlook it; if the visual style of Star Trek was the primary way in which it deviated from the original, the vast majority of fans would have forgiven that. Similarly for Star Wars.
That said, the only times where I feel the CGI in this film succeeds
is in things that Victor Fleming could never have accomplished in 1939.
Essentially this boils down to things like the magic force field that
protects Glinda’s territory, and of course Joey King (another terrific
acting job)’s China Girl.
A lot of this has to do specifically with the fact that this is a prequel- or at least, that it’s part of a series. Wizard of Oz
was a film that you could really immerse yourself in the environment, a
surreal world in all interpretations, but still one that was solid and
real enough to be fantastical and disturbing at the same time. In
other words, it was what even the best CGI would find a real struggle to
accomplish. While the first film was so impossible, yet real at the
same time that it drew you in, the way this film kicks off in the real
world with CGI wood pulls you right out, just in time for effects that you need to be drawn in.
As
we arrive in Oz, we’re shown to a CGI spectacle. This is something
that would have been far better done decades ago, probably at a higher
cost, so it would be passable. Except that, again, you’re already
pulled out by the CGI wood, so your suspension of disbelief is not
ready to find these CGI plants amazing in any way. Because of this,
the first truly awe-inspiring visual of the film is Mila Kunis’s in
those pants- but then, her behind is so flat that the scene’s not as
awe-inspiring as it could be.
I’ve gotten off topic. My point is, ground-breaking practical effects were a large part of what made the original Wizard of Oz
so magical, it was a major part of the power of the film, and standard
CGI that is in no way ground-beaking has no chance at recreating that
magic. There are great visuals in the film, yes, but they’re all later
on and they’re all very different from anything the original movie had.
That’s perfectly fine for scenes that aren’t like the scenes in the
original, such as the big gathering that makes up the climax of the
film. But when you first appear in Oz, this is a fairly important
issue.
This might be a good time to talk about the atmospheric similarities between these two films. The Wizard of Oz
is a film about a person who is accidentally transported to the
mysterious land of Oz, challenged by an evil witch, meets a group of
companions, and they travel to a final destination, all the while
growing as a person and defeating the evil witch. In this vein, Oz the Great and Powerful gets it. I’ll say that again: Mitchell Kapner’s story really gets the feeling of the story down.
There’s another part to this, and one that the story’s hands were tied on, a little bit. While L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
and other novels are in the public domain, MGM owns the rights to the
well-known film. This means that there can’t be ruby slippers, and
the Wicked Witch of the West can’t be green-skinned or have two eyes.
Except that this film clearly features the witch as being green-skinned
and having two eyes, and she also wears a red outfit, so why she can’t
have the red shoes that the audience is clamoring for with that red outfit is beyond me.
What
this comes down to is a conundrum all prequels must face: what
questions should be asked, and which ones should be answered. Since Wizard of Oz
didn’t exactly have a ton of mysteries other than maybe how Oz became
the wizard (the premise of this film, in case you missed that), it more
boils down to keeping things consistent. You know, the Witch of the
East wears ruby slippers and rides a bicycle, the Witch of the West
likes to cackle and owns a broom, flying monkeys. Several of these are
hit, but with how much the Witch of the East is focused on here,
ignoring all of these plot points regarding her kind of hurts the value
as a prequel. If Kyoryu Sentai Zyurranger was able to feature a Wicked Witch flying around on a bicycle, I see no reason why Disney couldn’t.
Meanwhile,
questions like “how did the witch become green?” are ones that I don’t
think anybody ever asked. Seriously, that was probably the furthest
question from anybody’s mind watching the film. Which isn’t always a
problem, but answering that in the gimmicky Disney way that this film
does draws other questions nobody asked to mind. For example, why do
some witches need wands (Glinda) and some don’t (the others)? Or why
is Theodora the only witch that has a natural affinity for one element
and a weakness for another? Again, these are questions that don’t
necessarily need
to be answered in a fantasy setting, but by answering other questions
that don’t need an answer, you draw attention to these questions. And
nothing hurts your suspension of disbelief like seeing that the most
powerful witch’s powers rely on an artifact that she apparently somehow
created, even though destroying it saps her powers and reveals the fact
that somebody apparently fed her an evil Bible-apple and... why?
I
promised I’d talk about Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis (other than
her pants and what they contain, anyway). Both of them do a passable
job, but neither are anything really spectacular. Kunis does her best
early on, when Theodora is alone with Oz. Once Evanora starts tricking
her to bring on the “lover scorned” side of her personality, she starts
to fall flat. Even her bursts of rage don’t really fit her.
Considering that one of the biggest roles in Kunis’s career was Jackie
on That ‘70s Show,
it’s pretty clear that she’s fully capable of both of these. My
inclination is to focus my scrutiny here on the script: the lines are
jarring and abrupt, and events don’t naturally lead into one another.
Focusing a little bit more on the character of Theodora and her
reactions could really have improved the second Act, as well as getting
rid of that godawful apple idea.
Michelle
Williams is a little harder to place. Some of her lines seem almost as
though they belong to the original Glinda, but more often she just
seems to be a Leia-style Rebel Princess, a young woman who speaks like
one. The juxtaposition of this with “Are you a good witch or a bad
witch?” Glinda is just awkward, and I’m not sure what they could have
done to fix this. Casting an older actress might have helped (although
Williams looks younger in the film than she does in her IMDb portrait,
so it might have been an intentional youthening), and simply writing her
lines to be a bit more consistent might have made the difference. I
could deal with a Glinda who was nothing like the character in the
original due to decades’ difference of experience, but this Glinda seems
a bit more established, with hints of what’s to come, yet other
personality traits that seem to have trouble co-existing with the more
regal side of her character. I’m going to ignore the budding romance
she has with Oz at the end of mere principle.
As a film on its own, Oz
stands, but doesn’t astound. The real strength of this film is the
climax. The last Act of this film establishes Magic vs Science as a
conflict, something that is hinted at in Act I but never really realized
until the end. Given the nature of certain discussions on the
internet, I find it worth noting that Oz, a man who is admittedly not
good-natured, idolizes Thomas Edison for his accomplishments, yet it’s
not until he discovers a way to be more like Edison that he (and those
around him) truly sees himself as a good person. Tesla fans must hate
this movie.
Oz the Great and Powerful
is an average film. It has its strengths and its weaknesses, and in
the end they leave something that is worth seeing at times and a little
awkward at other times. I watched this film because it had two actors
that I don’t see as great, but do enjoy seeing on-screen, and it
delivered on that promise. If you’re looking for a film that follows
many of the rules of the Oz
universe without being completely faithful to the little details
(though not contradicting them either), you should enjoy this film. If
you’re a casual movie-goer that’s not necessarily in love with Wizard of Oz, then I recommend you leave this film for a rental.
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