Watched: Maleficent (2014).
Ah, this was fine. It wasn’t perfect, but it was still good, and I feel like that has to count for something when there are so many terrible films for kids out there. There’s also something kind of wonderful about how the men in this film are cursed to irrelevance - there’s a major twist toward the end (that effectively rewrites Sleeping Beauty, for the better) that puts Maleficent in the spotlight instead of the prince, and everything Sharlto Copley’s king does to stop Maleficent is ultimately a waste of time.
There were pitfalls - for all of the depth and brilliance of Angelina Jolie in the lead role, Elle Fanning as Aurora left me cold; I suspect that’s a combination of the curse of the story (the blessings that the other fairies bestow upon Aurora kind of guarantee that she’ll be tied to some very concrete, unwavering character traits) and the fact that Elle Fanning just isn’t a very good actress. There were some tonal issues, too; as powerful as the scene after Maleficent loses her wings was, it was so emotionally raw that I worry that kids might have nightmares about it. (That said, I worry that kids will have nightmares about the entirety of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and that made a billion dollars, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about). The highs in this film were wonderful, but when mixed with the lows it made for an uneven experience.
It’s hard to get a good handle on this sort of stuff, because populist media that empowers women (both narratively and in terms of the actors involved) is still kind of new; there’s a reason that Frozen did extremely well, and it’s because the story it tells is something we haven’t really seen before. The problem, though, is in parsing how good it is after the refreshing element wears off; Avatar generated a ton of hype for its then-stunning visuals, but it all seems a little laughable now that we have a few years’ worth of distance and advances in technology. That’s not to say that Maleficent is Avatar, but if there’s an upward trend of women in interesting lead roles in kids’ movies, then this might start to look kind of average. And that’s probably a good thing. For now, though, this is worth seeing because it does what other films for children fail to do - it recognises that girls and women are just as human as boys and men.