Technically, I suppose I have been paid to watch this movie, inasmuch as I do have a personal Patreon of people who want to support my work specifically, and they’re aware of the writing I do here. But I have to tell you, it wasn’t enough. I haven’t ever worked out how much you’d have to pay me to get me to watch Hercules or Pocahontas, but I will now follow my instincts and say that probably no one’s that interested in getting me to do it. Even though, after I get some file editing done, my personal subscribers will be privileged to have an audio recording of me (and, for most of it, my son) complaining our way through this movie.
There are two lands. One has no given name; the other is called The Moors. The nameless one has a tyrannical king, Henry (Kenneth Cranham). The Moors has no leader and I guess is some sort of anarcho-libertarian collective. The only human-scale fairy is Maleficent (Isobelle Molloy). One day, the fairies Flittle (Lesley Manville), Knotgrass (Imelda Staunton), and Thistlewit (Juno Temple) come to tell her that the border guards have captured a boy stealing from the Pool of Jewels or whatever it is. He is Stefan (Michael Higgins). He and Maleficent grow into teenagers (Ella Purnell and Jackson Bews) and fall in love.
However, Stefan is consumed by . . . ambition seems mild. Despite being a boy who literally slept in a stable and was orphaned, he’s now a figure of power in King Henry’s court (played by Sharlto Copley). He betrays Maleficent (now, of course, Angelina Jolie) and cuts off her wings, which lets him marry Henry’s daughter and take over the throne. They have a child, and of course Maleficent invites herself to the christening, and we know what happens, but have we considered that no, we don’t? And the fairies are incompetent and Maleficent ends up caring for the child along with Diaval (Sam Riley), her raven that she turns into a person as needed.
Oh, friends, I hated this movie. Now, I freely admit that part of this is that Sleeping Beauty is my absolute favourite Disney animated feature of all time bar none. And Lord but they done my girl Merryweather dirty. She’s my second-favourite character in the movie, and here, she’s a nightmare. The CGI they’ve unleashed on those women is horrific, and the joke is that none of them are very bright. Not a joke I love. Maleficent isn’t recognizably Maleficent, but at least she’s something of an interesting character. Whereas Merryweather is just the worst.
See, it’s long been my theory that Merryweather has been doing the job the whole sixteen years, and here, she’s just as incompetent as the rest. I grant you that the queen in Sleeping Beauty doesn’t do much, but here, Queen Leila (Hannah New) gets one line—without even calling Maleficent “your excellency,” mind, though the rest of the scene is word-for-word—and basically dies on her way to her home planet. Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites) is nowhere near as developed, and his horse—one of Disney’s best horses originally—has no personality at all.
Okay, so it’s a lousy take on the original Disney Sleeping Beauty. Can we move on? Sure, okay; it also doesn’t make internal sense. How does Stefan get from being, again, an orphan who sleeps in the stable, to being a powerful member of the royal court enough to be one of the king’s advisors? Shut up, that’s how. Iron burns fairies, but somehow there’s conflict between a people who, you know, use a lot of iron and the fairies. Okay. The Moors has no government until Maleficent goes mad with power, but even when she’s a child, the border guards seem to report to her. Maleficent doesn’t turn into a dragon, but also she doesn’t turn Diaval back into a raven to let him escape.
Also, she wants her revenge in a way that will involve killing Aurora (uncredited baby or more likely babies, Vivienne Jolie-Pit, Eleanor Worthington-Cox, and eventually Elle Fanning), but Gods forbid she just let our comic relief pixies kill her with neglect. Which they are absolutely going to do, because they don’t even know what babies eat. I guess it’s okay to curse a baby but gauche to kill one. No wonder Aurora assumed Maleficent was her fairy godmother; everyone else in her life sucks. It makes the ending ridiculously predictable.
Parts of the movie are pretty. I do like the fact that Aurora (never Briar Rose here) at five is Vivienne Jolie-Pitt because Jolie-Pitt wasn’t scared of Jolie in the costume because, come on, that’s her mom. But I think the biggest problem with the movie can be summed up by the fact that the sweet fairy child who protects The Moors and heals tree branches and so forth is named Maleficent. A name which literally means evil. She doesn’t take it as a use-name; it’s her actual name. So yeah. Choices were made.