Seeing as The Wizard of Oz came out 74 years ago, and it’s still the sort of beloved classic that gets watched and re-watched on a regular basis by fans young and old, you might think that it should be one of those sacred cows that you just don’t fiddle with. That hasn’t stopped Disney from making this prequel though. Director Sam Raimi and writers Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire bring us this look at exactly how the wizard Dorothy quested to meet in the original film (and L. Frank Baum’s novel) came to leave Kansas and take up residence in the Land of Oz, how he managed to convince everyone there that he was a powerful wizard, and how he used that perceived power to become to ruler of the place. Whatever your feelings about whether or not a prequel to The Wizard of Oz should have been made, it’s here, so the only thing we can do is try to view it on its own terms and critique it as a standalone project. So, how does it fare in that respect? Unfortunately, not so great. Even with the kinetic style of Sam Raimi behind the camera, Oz the Great and Powerful is kind of a bore.
One of the main reasons this is the case is the script’s simplicity and lack of nuance. That might seem like a strange complaint to lob at a movie that’s a prequel to a childhood fairytale, but Oz takes a much more realist approach to its material than The Wizard of Oz did. In that film, Dorothy was just a stand-in character for the children in the audience, used to embody their fears of being separated from their parents and to teach the simple lesson that “there’s no place like home,” but Oz (James Franco) is a grown man with faults and ambitions. He has more of a personal journey to take and much more growth to do as an individual. Even the witches, who seemed to be mythic creatures that were a step above humanity in The Wizard of Oz, have human emotions and motivations here. This might have been an interesting direction to go in, but unfortunately the establishing of everyone’s characters and the journeys that they end up taking are all so cookie-cutter and telegraphed that they feel like they’re the stuff of broad fairytales anyway. You see where this movie is going from the very start, and there aren’t any real thrills or laughs that get provided along the way, so watching it just feels like a boring biding of time before the story finally decides to wrap itself up. Boring and Oz aren’t two words that should go together.
The screenwriting being a little simple isn’t the only problem Oz the Great and Powerful has either. Oz as a location just looks atrocious in this film. It’s another classic case of CGI being overused and making an entire movie—that’s supposed to be live action—look much more like video game footage than reality. And, more than that, something like Avatar has proven to us that digital effects can now effectively be used to create immersive and beautiful environments, so for a film to go for that approach and look so distractingly fake and phony in 2013 is just unacceptable. Even the sparse sets and painted backdrops of The Wizard of Oz work better than the environments here, because they invite you to fill in their blanks with your imagination. Here the richness of the designed fakery fills in all the gaps for you, with stuff that doesn’t look good, so it’s actually restrictive to your imagination. And who wants to take a kid to a movie that doesn’t lead to them going off on crazy adventures in their heads?
The performances, comparatively, aren’t nearly as much of an issue, but they still manage to be a mixed bag. The main problem is Franco, who’s just terrible in the lead role. He’s maybe the most hit or miss actor I’ve ever seen, as if he’s interested in a project he actually looks engaged and feels authentic, and if he’s just cashing a check he comes off as being an acting amateur struggling to spit out his lines as memorized and relying on the charm of his stoner grin to get through the performance. His turn as Oz most definitely falls into that latter category, as there probably isn’t a single line in the film that Franco is able to deliver without visibly being an actor reading his lines. You’d like to cut him some slack and attribute that to the fact that the character he’s playing is something of a huckster, but the phenomenon is just too pervasive. There’s no excusing it.
Mila Kunis in the role of the witch Theodora isn’t as much of a problem, but there are still issues with her performance. Early on in the film, when she’s just playing a naive young girl, she does fine and is even able to get you to feel empathy for her. This is especially impressive, as she’s mostly given clunky melodramatics as motivations and she’s forced to word-vomit way too much expositional dialogue. But, later on in the film, when she dons some prosthetics and plays a character who should be much more of a distinct oddity, she still just looks and sounds way too much like Mila Kunis to pull it off. I’m afraid her voice is just too distinctive for her to do very much transformation. For the entire second half of the movie, whenever she spoke, I had the urge to respond to the screen with a dismissive, “Shut up, Meg.”
Rachel Weisz is pretty decent playing the witch Evanora, but there’s less to say about her performance. She gets the smallest part of all the main characters, and isn’t really asked to pull off much more than being a powerful witch; which she does fine. Michelle Williams though, she’s truly great as Glinda. Not only does she seem like the only actor here who’s able to remain totally committed and in the moment while surrounded by the emptiness of the green screen, but she also just becomes Glinda the Good Witch in a way that makes you completely forget that she’s an actress who you’ve seen do anything else. Her cadence and her delivery—it’s a comforting warm blanket and an anachronism from the 30s. You could digitally insert her over Billie Burke’s performance as Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, and the film wouldn’t suffer at all for the alteration. If there’s any reason to give Oz the Great and Powerful a watch, it’s if you’re a fan of Williams and want to catch another of her top-notch performances.
Ultimately though, what she’s able to accomplish isn’t nearly enough to make this one a recommendation. And, setting all open mindedness and willingness to view this as a work separate from The Wizard of Oz aside, this movie certainly doesn’t have what it takes to be a worthy addition to the film world that Victor Fleming’s 1939 classic created. There’s just no magic here. Glinda should be an unearthly angel, not a hot chick who you can make out with. The main character of an Oz story should be young and naive, so you can view the world through their cynicism-free point of view. They definitely shouldn’t be an anti-hero like Franco’s character. Who the heck wants to hear a fairytale about an anti-hero? That’s what comic books are for. And why wasn’t there any singing in this movie? The Munchkins start a song for about ten seconds, and then they get rudely interrupted. Why would you make a prequel to the film version of The Wizard of Oz and not make it a musical? It’s an absolutely absurd choice, and now that I’m done writing this review, I’m going to go listen to ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow‘ about a hundred times to try to forget that this unnecessary trip back to Oz ever happened.
