This film is a TRUE fairy tale. It's dark. It's raw. And it's written from the dark, raw experience of women.
Maleficent is about what happens when your Prince turns into a Frog. It's the personal, inner journey to recover from a physical trauma and emotional betrayal by those who are closest to us and who we trust the most. It's about how to survive that type of horrific evil without becoming evil yourself. It's message is that profound.
The critics complaining about this film want "fairy tales" to stay in the same "one-love-fits-all" mode where people are either good or evil and that all one needs is to find "romantic" love and marry a "good" Prince or Princess, and you will live "happily ever after," safe from any pain or sorrow. But real life is a lot messier than that.
It's actually evidence of how rare it is to see women's unfiltered subjective emotional landscape portrayed on film that it seems many of the critics cannot even wrap their brains around it!
No matter. This film is so sensually visually stunning and viscerally emotionally cathartic that sheer word of mouth enthusiasm is going to make this a blockbuster, no matter what the critics say.
And it's equally rare to see a protagonist whose inner landscape is more complex than simply extracting revenge, destroying their enemies and...roll credits. People are more complicated than THAT fairy tale we are sold in every other "action" and "adventure" film that only serves to reinforce the psychopathic values of revenge and bravado.
Sometimes a film is so ahead of its time that the critics are behind and so philosophically deep that it's message is incomprehensible to the more superficial among us. This is one such film.
Woolverton and Jolie have crafted a masterpiece.
Don't miss it.
Maleficent is about what happens when your Prince turns into a Frog. It's the personal, inner journey to recover from a physical trauma and emotional betrayal by those who are closest to us and who we trust the most. It's about how to survive that type of horrific evil without becoming evil yourself. It's message is that profound.
The critics complaining about this film want "fairy tales" to stay in the same "one-love-fits-all" mode where people are either good or evil and that all one needs is to find "romantic" love and marry a "good" Prince or Princess, and you will live "happily ever after," safe from any pain or sorrow. But real life is a lot messier than that.
It's actually evidence of how rare it is to see women's unfiltered subjective emotional landscape portrayed on film that it seems many of the critics cannot even wrap their brains around it!
No matter. This film is so sensually visually stunning and viscerally emotionally cathartic that sheer word of mouth enthusiasm is going to make this a blockbuster, no matter what the critics say.
And it's equally rare to see a protagonist whose inner landscape is more complex than simply extracting revenge, destroying their enemies and...roll credits. People are more complicated than THAT fairy tale we are sold in every other "action" and "adventure" film that only serves to reinforce the psychopathic values of revenge and bravado.
Sometimes a film is so ahead of its time that the critics are behind and so philosophically deep that it's message is incomprehensible to the more superficial among us. This is one such film.
Woolverton and Jolie have crafted a masterpiece.
Don't miss it.