Maleficent movie poster

Maleficent

In theaters May 30, 2014

[hero heading=”MALEFICENT” tagline=”Maleficent won’t bother you if you go into it prepared to have your childhood ruined. This spin off of Sleeping Beauty actually turns out to be more of a butchering of the original story.”]

Told from the villain’s point of view, this story shows audiences what “really happened” on Aurora’s sixteenth birthday and everything leading up to it. After having her heart broken by the king, Maleficent curses his child on the day of her christening, which stays relatively true to the story we know and love so well. However, when the child is sent away to live with three fairies in the forest, Maleficent begins to take care of her and love her like a mother loves a daughter.

This is when things get sticky. She attempts to lift the curse and save Aurora from her impending doom. With little to no character development and ad-hoc writing, the story falls disappointingly flat. We are left with a great deal of questions unanswered and much to be desired from the performances. There are no characters for audiences to root for because we don’t get to know any of them in the hour and a half of screen time.

Right after the success of Frozen, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Disney would try to take another stab at making an unconventional fairy tale. But instead of adding a refreshing element of surprise, they tried to make the movie too many things at once and left us with a muddled version of a classic fairy tale favorite.


Rebecca


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