Was Maleficent’s Sequel an Improvement on It?

Does anyone else remember my series about the 2014 movie Maleficent? Probably not. It didn’t get an enthusiastic reader response, but it was one of my favorite things to write, so for what will likely be my last Halloween-themed blog post, I’m writing about its sequel.

But before I dive into Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), I’d like to write a few words about Alice in Wonderland (2010), a film with much in common with the first Maleficent movie. Both were made by the Walt Disney company and had screenplays written by Linda Woolverton. Robert Stromberg was the production designer of the earlier movie and directed the later one. And both had premises that I hate. In Alice‘s case that premise was taking Lewis Carroll’s freewheeling Alice books and using them to make a completely generic fantasy adventure about a prophesied hero slaying a monster, uncrowning a tyrannical usurper and restoring a rightful monarch to their throne.^[1]I especially hate the hypocrisy of this when the movie preaches nonconformity and risk taking even as it takes something enjoyably crazy and makes it completely formulaic, but I digress. However, as with Maleficent later, my attachment to the source material made me too curious to refrain from watching the thing. And when I did, as with Maleficent, I found myself liking it more than I wanted to like it yet still finding it far too flawed for me to consider it a pleasant surprise. In 2016, I saw the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and for once, my curiosity led to something good.

Despite that movie having a less experienced director than its predecessor, I found it to be the superior viewing experience by far.^[2]Well, I’ll admit Johnny Depp was more annoying and Anne Hathaway didn’t get any fun moments but other than that, everything about the sequel was superior. The story, while still not much like what Lewis Carroll wrote, was interesting and emotionally engaging if imperfect. The screenplay was so much wittier than the first that I couldn’t believe it was written by the same writer. (It was.) Alice’s conflict was more compelling, both in the real world and in Wonderland, and Mia Wasikowska’s performance was better too. On the whole, an imperfect but very fun popcorn movie.

So when Maleficent: Mistress of Evil came on the scene, I was hoping for another pleasant surprise. Were my hopes fulfilled? Err, well….

At first, I thought they would be. One of my criticisms of the first Maleficent movie, one of the biggest ones in fact, was that both its antiheroine’s descent into evil and her redemption were too flimsy. All it took was one betrayal at the hands of her old boyfriend to turn her so heartless she’d curse his infant daughter out of spite and all it took was watching that daughter grow up to bring her back to her senses. Even if she did learn to love the girl, I doubted this would completely cure her soul. Here’s what I wrote on the subject.

I feel like rather than make Maleficent a better person, she’d realistically be crueler and more self-righteous than ever, believing that she and possibly Aurora were the only ones in the world capable of real love. In general, if it’s not combined with a general benevolence towards humankind, I don’t really buy the idea that loving just one person is enough to make you a good person. In fact, obsessive love for a single individual can be the motive for horrifying acts.

Well, it looks like returning screenwriter Woolverton and newcomers Noah Harpster and Michah Fitzerman-Blue agree with me because that’s this sequel premise. When Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson taking over for Brandon Thwaites from the previous film) proposes marriage to Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning), now Queen of the fairies, Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) is hostile to the idea, given her own bad experiences with humans and romance. It looks like overcoming her prejudices and bitterness will take longer than the first movie implied. The sequel also seeks to answer questions like “how come none of the other fairy creatures look like Maleficent?” and “why did the story get passed down that she was the villain if she saved Aurora?” It even manages to make the idea of Maleficent being a good guy, something I’d always despised as rote subversiveness for the sake of subversiveness, work for me. Aurora convinces her to give Phillip and his family a chance and meet with them over dinner. Angelina Jolie has some fun in the scene of Maleficent rehearsing her greeting. “Remember it’s not a threat,” her shapeshifting raven familiar, Diaval (Sam Riley), coaches her. It’s quite entertaining seeing this character struggle not to come across as evil and also a bit poignant since she’s doing it for her beloved foster daughter’s sake.

Maleficent’s suspicions are partly fueled by the fact the fairies have been mysteriously disappearing along the border of Phillip’s kingdom. His father, King John (Robert Lindsay)^[3]Don’t ask me why he’s not named King Hubert like Phillip’s father in the 1959 animated Sleeping Beauty. genuinely wants to make peace but his fairy-hating wife, Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfieffer), is so obviously the bad guy that the movie doesn’t even try to misdirect the viewers.^[4]In Charles Perrault’s version of Sleeping Beauty, the prince’s mother was also a villain though she wasn’t much like Ingrith. Could this sequel have taken inspiration from that? … Continue reading At the entertainingly tense dinner, she continually baits Maleficent, and the meal ends in disaster. Unfortunately, this is also where the story stalls.

A wounded Maleficent is rescued by something called a fey, a member of her own particular species of fairy whom she can’t remember ever encountering before. He takes her to the feys’ secret hideout, and we learn their history, why they’re in hiding, how Maleficent is supposed to help and… it’s all really boring. Mind you, there are some fun visuals as we learn that there is a different kind of fey for every environment on Earth.

But the characters themselves are so boring! There’s a good cop fey (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who wants to make peace with the humans and a bad cop fey (Ed Skrien) who wants to destroy them. Other than that, I don’t think they have any personality traits whatsoever. It’s the exact same conflict between fairies and humans that the movie already had going but with less fun characterizations. Maleficent herself is largely a passive observer during the middle section of the story and it’s not clear to me how what she sees and hears of the feys impacts her later decisions.

The parts of the middle section that revolve around the human characters work better though it’s annoying that neither Aurora, Phillip nor anyone else suspects Ingrith of framing Maleficent when that’s obviously what she did. Nonetheless, Michelle Pfieffer is a lot of fun as the character. It’s a pity she and Jolie only have two scenes together. My ideal version of Mistress of Evil would mostly consist of them trying to out-evil-queen each other. As with King Stefan in the first movie, there’s an implied tragic backstory for this villain which the film doesn’t have time to develop but, given the story’s structure, that feels reasonable. We only ever see Ingrith after she’s completely descended into villainy so it’s fine to give her just a little bit of depth with a backstory she explains in one scene. By contrast, Stefan was introduced to as an innocent boy at the beginning of Maleficent and by the end, he’d become a crazy and evil old man. It really felt we should have seen more of his evolution. Also, as I’ve implied before Pfieffer’s performance as Ingrith is just a better grade of ham than Sharlto Copley’s performance as Stefan was.

Aurora is probably a better developed character here than she was in either Sleeping Beauty or Maleficent. That’s not to say she’s a particularly great heroine but I like her well enough.

Here’s what I wrote about Phillip’s character in Maleficent.

I actually feel sorry for Brenton Thwaites, whose role in this movie is almost impossible to pull off. He can’t be unappealing and has to have some kind of chemistry with Aurora or else the twist will be too obvious. Plus, the movie wants to leave the possibility of a future romance between them on the table for viewers who like the idea. The script clearly wants Phillip to be a positive figure, even having him be the one to say that just because he’s physically attracted to Aurora, it doesn’t mean he’s in love with her, and that it would be inappropriate for him to kiss her while she’s unconscious. But on the other hand, he can’t be too appealing and can’t have too much chemistry with Aurora or else the twist won’t make sense, and viewers will be dissatisfied that his kiss doesn’t wake her up. I don’t know what actor could have pulled off this balance.

In Mistress of Evil, Phillip is a much more straightforward love interest/hero. However, Richard Dickerson actually comes across as even blander than Brenton Thwaites did as the character!

The animated Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty (voiced by Bill Shirley) may have been a basic fairy tale prince character, one who didn’t even have any dialogue in the movie’s second half, but he was far more charismatic than Phillip in this film.^[5]I’d argue that Phillip having no dialogue in the second half served to connect him in viewers’ minds to Aurora who also had none.

And you know what? I like the animated Aurora in Sleeping Beauty too! Sure, her character basically amounted to a figurehead, but she was a well-done figurehead. The animators gave her a bold, flirtatious quality, sort of a sexiness, which arguably was inappropriate for someone who had grown up with only a trio of maiden aunts for role models, but it set her apart from previous Disney princess characters.

And could her voice actress Mary Costa ever sing! She…sorry, I’m supposed to be writing about Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, aren’t I?^[6]The 1959 Sleeping Beauty is a movie that I love but it’s also a movie that has a sizable fanbase and there are already a lot of blog posts about it out there. On this blog, I gravitate more … Continue reading Well, I’ve written about the beginning and the middle, and I feel like this is the kind of story where I can’t give you an idea of the quality without delving into the end. If you don’t want it spoiled for you, skip down to the last paragraph for my final thoughts.

This sequel ultimately undoes the good will it earned from me by implying that Maleficent’s hatred of humans would be harder to dissolve than the first movie implied. In the climactic battle, she sees Phillip grant one of the fey its life at great risk to himself and just like that, she totally approves of him as Aurora’s husband and is perfectly willing to see an alliance between humans and fairies. Her big character arc is over. Lame.

You may remember from my old blog series on the first Maleficent movie-actually, you almost certainly don’t but let’s say you may-that I love the characters of Flora, Fauna and Merryweather from Sleeping Beauty and I resented seeing their equivalents in Maleficent (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville and Juno Temple) be such pathetic, negative characters for the sake of subversiveness. Well, in Mistress of Evil‘s climax, one of them, after having been a useless ditz in every scene prior, heroically sacrifices herself for her fellow fairies. I suppose I should be grateful for that. I do like it when seemingly comedic figures turn out to have dramatic depths. That’s partly why I love Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. On the other hand, what a bizarre choice of character to kill off! I’m not sure how we’re supposed to react.

The whole resolution is rather unconvincing if you think about it for a few seconds. After a long and violent battle, Ingrith is captured and Maleficent, Aurora and Phillip just declare that there will be a peace between the two sides. Then, without even stopping to bury the dead, everyone holds hands and happily watches the wedding of Phillip and Aurora. (In a humorous bit, one character even apologizes “to anyone (he) might have mauled today.”) I can buy something like that in a Narnia movie, but Mistress of Evil seems to want to be a more serious, even grim story about racism.^[7]Speaking of which, how come in stories like these the humans are always the ones oppressing the fantasy creatures? They’re the ones with magic powers! It feels like it should be harder to achieve peace after what we’ve witnessed. And the weird thing is the movie had the opportunity to lower the body count and make the resolution easier to sell. In one scene, Maleficent is told that she has “the power of life and death, destruction and rebirth.” This led me to assume she’d bring the sympathetic characters who’d perished in the climax back to life but no, she doesn’t.^[8]To get into even more specific spoilers, the humans have found a way to kill the fairies by turning them into whatever form of nature they most resemble. (Trees, flowers, mushrooms, etc.) … Continue reading

I also can’t help but note that this sequel forgets or ignores the mechanics of the curse on Aurora. She was doomed “to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a sleep like death.” That was a curse on her. There was nothing evil about the spindle itself. Having said all that, it is nice that this sequel, unlike the first Maleficent, realizes fans of the character would want to see Maleficent herself transform into a giant monster at the climax, not her raven.

And in the end, there’s a fun little homage to one of my favorite jokes from the old, animated Sleeping Beauty.

So is Maleficent: Mistress of Evil an improvement on its predecessor? Well…probably. It’s better directed (by Joachim Ronning.) The action scenes are more exciting. The pacing is much better with none of the first movie’s rushed storytelling. (If anything, it suffers from the opposite problem, taking too long to tell a simple story.) The visuals are also more eye catching, and they weren’t bad in the first movie so that’s saying something. I guess it’s an improvement but not by very much. And that’s sad because the first thirty-five minutes led me to expect it’d be a big improvement. However much I might roll my eyes over the whole idea of Maleficent being a misunderstood heroine, I also can’t help but sigh over the wasted potential on display here.