The Movie Room

Oz the Great and Powerful 2013, directed by Sam Raimi

Rating: 6/10

When I saw this movie in IMAX 3D, it was such a fun experience and in the moment it was great. Watching it now at home in a lighted room on a 2D TV over ten years later, it does not work as well, but it is not the unmitigated disaster I feared it would be.

 I’ve heard and seen many bad mouth Mila Kunis’s performance in this, but she does her best given that her character is the worst written in a pretty horrible script. Her Wicked Witch isn’t really believable, but no one would be able to pull off making the audience believe that the Wicked Witch we know and fear from the 1939 classic was actually completely pure of heart until she fell in love with a guy at first sight and then when he talked to another woman less than 24 hours later she lost her entire soul. Is one really so pure of heart if that’s all it takes to go full murder monster? Rachel Weisz doesn’t have much to do, which means there is less room for a distractingly nonsensical character arc, so she is just able to vamp and have fun, while James Franco just does his James Franco thing (all of his speeches kept taking me back for some reason to his performance in Howl), and Zach Braff similarly does his Zach Braff thing. Michelle Williams must really be magic because she is somehow able to take a character who is extremely one-note (pure goodness, like Mila Kunis’s Theodora seemingly was meant to be pre-“heart break”) and make her actually interesting to watch. I guess, then, that I agree with people who say Mila Kunis is miscast, only because I feel like it is impossible to cast such a poorly conceived character.

But I can deal with a bad script if the movie around it makes up for it, especially in a fantasy film that is more about spectacle than sense; unfortunately, the visual effects in this movie are a huge mess. The opening section does such great work with practical effects, and then the whole point of the Wizard is that his magic is all practical, so I don’t know why the movie didn’t just embrace this philosophy and do the film as mostly practical. Instead, almost the entire thing is just CGI, but not in a cool way like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or Sin City. The CGI environments are not only overwhelming for the audience, but also for the actors it seems like—no one ever really seems to interact with the world around them and half the time it seems like they are struggling for what to look at or how shocked they should appear. Practical effects may have been hard to do on such a large scale, but I am completely sure that they would age better than the monstrous cityscapes here.

This movie is still fun enough to watch, but it is overlong and an eyesore and just written with little to no understanding of how character arcs work. I feel like if I put this on as the background while I got some work done, I would be happy enough.