The recent spate of live action remakes of Disney classics has been hit or miss for me, but I genuinely enjoyed 2014’s Maleficent, which reimagined the evil queen from the classic Sleeping Beauty into the true love’s kiss that wakes Aurora from the curse. I fully anticipated loving this second installment in the continuing story, and was deeply disappointed by what unfolded onscreen.
In the writing of this piece, the spoilers got away from me. If you’d like a spoiler-free version, here it is: I didn’t like this movie. The tropes were tired, the writing was lazy, it wasn’t escapist enough, and the plot depended on speciesism, which is just racism disguised as a fantasy plot. Maybe if I hadn’t just seen this plot over the summer in Carnival Row I’d have been more forgiving, but I didn’t have to pay anything (extra) for Carnival Row, and I spent $11 on my ticket for this movie.
Wait for this on Disney Plus, I guess, or skip it entirely. You won’t be missing much.
Final warning: Spoilers ahead!
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil tried so hard to be more than it was. A story about a wedding, the blending of families, Maleficent’s past, some mysticism that I honestly missed (even though I never actually left the theater) about a phoenix, a fae uprising, and a queen plotting to kill all the tiny little fairies. Oh, and I guess the blossoming mother/daughter relationship that was the literal, actual heart of Maleficent, but I hope you weren’t too attached to that last one.
This movie is set five years after Maleficent broke her own curse by bestowing true love’s kiss on Aurora and making her Queen of the Moors. Instead of building on the relationship established in the first film, this movie’s very premise depended on a mother and daughter figure, who, again, spent the entire first movie falling in love with each other, having such a deep disconnect in that love and trust that one believes the other would squander that love and happiness for some petty revenge.
If that paragraph seems convoluted, I’ll spell it out a little better. Remember Phillip from the first movie? He and Aurora are going to get married, so they arrange a meet-the-parents dinner which goes horrifically awry. The king ends up under a curse and Maleficent is immediately suspected, as it’s the same sleeping curse that Aurora was under in the first movie. Aurora immediately believes that Maleficent is at fault and accepts shelter from Phillip’s mother, who she’d only met an hour before.
This, by the way, is more than halfway through dinner, after watching Ingrith (Phillip’s mother) deliberately attempt to antagonize Maleficent. Either Aurora is unforgivably stupid or needlessly cruel, but it has to be one or the other.
Maleficent runs away from the castle and is shot by iron in the escape. A winged, horned fairy (like Maleficent) named Conall (who is played by an incredibly wasted Chiwetel Ejiofor) saves her life and takes her to a colony of creatures that look exactly like her. In the course of . . . an afternoon, I guess, she becomes super attached to this character before he sacrifices his life for hers that evening in the most stunning depiction of a black man sacrificing his life for a white woman that I have seen in recent years. Not an especially good look. Because her magical powers are stronger than other fairies, he believes she’s got phoenix energy that goes back to the dark phoenix, which was an ancestor of the fae, which presumably is why he felt she needed to survive and why he’d take the iron arrow for her.
It takes him most of the rest of the movie to die and there’s a lot of glowy, gold energy as he does so. I didn’t entirely understand what was happening. If they explained any of what was going on during those scenes, I completely missed it. There aren’t any firm indicators, but it’s entirely possible that this entire movie happens over the course of two days.
There’s a somewhat convoluted subplot where Ingrith wants to start a war with the fae folk just to watch the world burn but also because she just hates them. Sound like anything you can correlate to our lives here in the real world? She creates a powder that can instantly kill fairies and then demonstrates it in a truly sad and disturbing scene that starts with an adorable tiny dandelion man crying for his life and ends with her blowing dandelion seeds across a dungeon. If you need me, I’ll be over here trying to scrub my brain from ever remembering that scene exists.
Ingrith invites all of the fairies from the Moors to come to the wedding of Phillip and Aurora. They have no idea anything is weird is going on, since Aurora didn’t bother to tell them when she ran to the Moors looking for Maleficent and Maleficent is off communing with Conall during his glowy, golden death, so they show up and are escorted into a chapel, which kicks off a truly stupid and bizarre scene (with straight up Holocaust imagery) where a henchman of Ingrith’s plays the church organ. Every time she hits a particular key, some of the red powder sprays out onto the fairies below.
I wish I could show you a clip of this scene. You guys, even as an “I’m so evil I’m just going to do this in the most bizarre way so I can revel in my evilness,” it doesn’t work. The red dust comes out in puffs from literally only one location that are easily dodged if you just look out for them. Every fairy smaller than the giant tree folk can hide under the pews and escape the dust, and all the giant tree folk have to do is stand directly under the balcony with the organ, because the dust is blowing out across the chapel.
Instead, they all mill about. One of the trees gets hit with dust instead of breaking a window so they can all fly out and escape. Then the blue fairy (of the famous three that helped raise Aurora) sacrifices herself by flying into the organ pipe and clogging it with blue flowers.
They’re eventually saved by Diaval (the crow from the first film), who gets turned into a beaked bear in what was literally the only good scene of the entire movie. He’d asked Maleficent if she could turn him into a bear at the beginning of the film when they showed up for dinner with the future in-laws. I honestly don’t remember what he did the rest of the film, but the call back to the beginning was fun.
Maleficent sacrifices herself to save Aurora’s life, Aurora cries, but then the whole phoenix storyline kicks in and Maleficent saves the day with her new big phoenix energy. Somehow, this transformation and some words from both Phillip and Aurora about unity are enough that literally everyone involved in this battle gives each other some sheepish smiles as they drop their weapons and line up to watch Phillip and Aurora get married.
Maybe it’s just a sign of the times, but I’d rather have more escapism in my escapist interests. I also quite enjoy it when the narrative actually makes sense. This was convoluted, had way too many leaps in logic, and depended on a relationship they’d spent an entire movie building being so fragile that it could fall apart in moments.
To which I say, no thanks.
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