Movie Review: Maleficent - Mistress of Evil (Spoiler Alert)
The original Disney movie, starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, focused on the story of a young naive faerie, who fell in love with a human. That human just happens to be the self-centered and ambitious Stefan, who violently betrays Maleficent in order to become king. Understandably, rage over this betrayal infects everything this magical faerie does, up to and including turning the magical kingdom over which Maleficent rules, the Moors, dark, and cursing Stefan's daughter, Aurora, to die by pricking her finger on a spinning wheel when the girl is to turn sixteen. Maleficent watches over Aurora, played by Elle Fanning, as she is raised in the woods, eventually comes to recognize the young girl's innocence, and attempts to undo her curse, but to no avail. Maleficent arranges for Prince Philip to attempt to revive Aurora with true love's first kiss. However, it turns out that since Philip had just met Aurora, the two aren't quite yet in love. Then it dawns on Maleficent, and she kisses the girl on the forehead. Maleficent has learned to love again. The movie ends with Stefan dying while trying to seek revenge on Maleficent, Maleficent restoring the Moors to their former beauty and setting Aurora as the Queen of the Moors and the human world, and Aurora continuing with her romance with Philip.
With all conflicts seemingly resolved, the sequel will have a tough hill to climb. Disney chooses to attack this by portraying the 2014 film as just a smaller piece of a much larger world, with an even greater danger. That danger is personified in Prince Philip's mother, Queen Ingrith, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.
The film draws its audience in with an opening mystery, which quickly turns to horror. Three humans attempt to abduct a few small faeries from the Moors. A large, magical creature confronts the poachers, killing two of them. This is Maleficent, taking drastic action to protect the magical creatures of the Moors. The survivor returns to Ulstead, Philip's future kingdom, and sells what appears to be a magical flower to a mysterious figure.
As for the writing, the plot juxtaposes two strong female leads, Maleficent, who is jaded and remains suspicious of humans, and Ingrith, a cold and calculating queen, masterfully manipulating everyone for her own ambition.
Maleficent's suspicious nature falls right into Ingrith's plan to portray her as an enemy of the humans, who has cast a curse on Ingrith's husband, the King. Ingrith uses Maleficent's pride, and with cunning subtlety uses inferences and backhanded compliments to goad the faerie to react at a celebratory dinner in a show of intimidation. When the Kings rises in response, Ingrith rushes to his side, and John is suddenly taken ill. All believe Maleficent and her dark magic to be to blame, but Ingrith has secretly used the needle from the cursed spinning wheel to curse John.
Maleficent escapes, but Ingrith has driven a wedge between her and Aurora. The audience soon learns that Ingrith and her minions have long prepared to wipe our faerie-kind and take over the Moors, through the creation of iron musket shots; iron being a substance harmful to faeries. Worse still, Ingrith has maimed and enslaved a faerie named Lickspittle to use a special flower from the Moors, a tomb bloom, to combine with iron powder to create a weapon that robs faeries of their magic and turns them into mundane plant life. Mushroom-like faeries turn into ordinary mushrooms. Dandelion-like faeries turn into ordinary dandelions. Tree-like faeries turn into real trees.
Maleficent, wounded by an iron round in her escape shot by Ingrith's trusted aid and expert crossbow marksman, Gerda, is rescued by another like her, a dark faerie named Borra. Borra introduces Maleficent to a secret world of dark faeries, known as the fey, who have gone into hiding from the humans. When Maleficent realizes that all of the tomb blooms have been harvested from the Moors, and that Ingrith has invited all of faerie-kind to attend the wedding of Philip and Aurora, she senses a trap. The fey are off to war for their own survival.
Meanwhile, faeries, enticed to see this once in a lifetime union of the human world and the magic world, dutifully march into a wedding chapel excited to see the wedding. But there they are trapped. With Gerda playing the wedding music on the grand pipe organ, she hits the key that releases the secret weapon from one of the pipes. Faeries touched by the substance become plants. Only through sacrifice does Fittle, the blue faerie who helped raise Aurora, plug herself in the organ pipe to stop the organ from devastating the trapped faeries. But Fittle is turned into a blue flower.
The humans are caught off-guard by the multitude of fey on the attack. Off-guard, but not unprepared. The humans have manufactured enough weapons with the secret substance to counter the fey assault.
Aurora, however, has discovered Ingrith's plot. While she is at first locked away, Philips finds her, and Aurora tells him of his mother's treachery. A magnificent battle ensues. Lickspittle presents Maleficent with the needle from the spindle, and she breaks the curse, awaking John and causing the spindle to disappear. Aware of the plot, John works to gain control of his forces to press for peace. Maleficent turns Ingrith into a goat, to which John and Philip agree they will wait for a while before requesting Maleficent turn her back to being a human.
The wedding resumes, succeeding in uniting the humans and faeries. In a bitter sweet moment,
while Knotgrass and Thistlewit argue over whether Aurora's dress should be red or green, Fittle, now a blue flower, turns the dress blue. Maleficent promises to be back for the christening.
Disney has crafted a sequel that does not minimize the original. In the original, Maleficent overcame her own desire for revenge to unify two kingdoms. The sequel does retcon that to be the kingdom of Aurora's father, Stefan, and the Moors. But it works, to fit the plot realistically into the bigger picture that accounts for Prince Philip and his family. The portrayal of fear leading to a desire to conquer in Ingrith is understandable, and skillfully laid out. The way to eradicate faeries, using their own magic and a substance known to be harmful to them, is a creative spin on the faerie genre. Nonetheless, this is where the movie's rating of PG must be emphasized, as the sight of faeries being either killed or transformed into nothing but plants would be shocking and emotionally scarring for young children. The sudden appearance of a whole race of dark faeries like Maleficent was surprising, but a valid exercise of license over a subject matter heretofore not addressed, namely Maleficent's origin. If you can stomach the violence, which by adult standards is not bad, but by kids' standards could be shocking, then the writing is well-done.
From the beginning of the movie, the audience gets the hint that the film's title is ironic. Maleficent is not evil. She is still just jaded due to her betrayal by a human she thought loved her. She once again overcomes her own biases and prejudice to unite two kingdoms.
Visually, the film is stunning. The Moors is beautiful. The computer graphics is truly art that is stunning in its execution. The small faeries provide silly, slapstick humor. The atmosphere of foreboding and mistrust emanating from Maleficent is palpable. Ingrith's dressing room, full of porcelain doll-like mannequins for the Queen's dress is appropriately creepy, as is the way Ingrith enters her lair, by seemingly cracking the neck of one of the mannequins. The scene of Ingrith walking past the workers forging the musket balls is dark and fiery, like Satan overseeing the restless labors of Hell. Lickspittle's laboratory is dark, with an underlying sense of terror. The final battle scene is both beautiful and horrifying. The weapons explode in vibrant colors of red, with faeries morphing into lovely flora as they perish.
With respect to the acting, Angelina Jolie and Michelle Pfeiffer are solid professionals, as is Elle Fanning and the rest of the cast.
From a studio known for hovering between two extremes when it films a sequel, either disheartening poor or masterfully crafted, Disney has scored a win with Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, at least for adults. Parents should be careful before allowing children, particularly small children, to watch this film. The violence, particularly as it affects faeries, is concerning.
The video version of this critique can be found on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0nAmY7BJjeE
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References
"Maleficent (2014): Plot Summary," Internet Movie Database (accessed May 30, 2020).
"Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019): Plot Synopsis," Internet Movie Database (accessed May 30, 2020).
Overly Sarcastic Productions, "Trope Talk: Sequels," YouTube Video (May 1, 2020).
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