OZ: THE GREAT AND POWERFUL

While most classic works of children’s literature have been mined to death, L. Frank Baum’s beloved creation ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ has remained relatively untouched. It helps that the 1939 MGM musical adaptation starring Judy Garland is pretty much regarded as definitive, as well as a sacred film in its own right. Disney have long had their eyes on the Oz property though, and now that the copyright on Baum’s original novel has lapsed into public domain, they’ve launched their own take on the story with ‘Oz: The Great and Powerful’, featuring an all-star cast, exuberant production design and acclaimed genre-director Sam Raimi at the helm.

Acting as a prequel to Dorothy’s adventures, ‘Oz: The Great and Powerful’ follows the exploits of Oscar Diggs (James Franco), or Oz for short, a con-man and magician from Kansas who, while making an escape from the traveling circus he works for, gets sucked into a tornado and blown to the magical land of Oz. Here he meets Theodora (Mila Kunis), a young and impressionable witch who becomes smitten with the manipulative charmer, and declares him the prophesied Wizard who will free the land from the grip of a wicked witch. As Oscar is dragged into a feud between Theodora and her sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and the Good Witch Glinda (Michelle Williams), he has to find the good man inside him and become the leader they all believe he can be.

Raimi begins the film with a sepia, window-boxed sequence reminiscent of the MGM film, and while this is a charming way to start, it’s also the first hint at the problems that ends up crippling the film. Rather than making itself something distinct in its own right, like the startling 1985 film ‘Return to Oz’, what we have here is a film that spend so much time trying to be the MGM film, and later within Oz, as close to the Disney box-office giant ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (2010) as it possibly can, that it never creates an identity for itself, or even adheres to the existing mythology of Baum’s Oz series. The visual landscape of the film is almost a carbon copy of Tim Burton’s ‘Alice’, which itself was far too busy to be watchable, so that this Oz doesn’t offer anything new to say, either about the visual history of Oz or about fantasy filmmaking itself. Usually a director full of style and danger, Raimi seems to be as colour-by-numbers as the empty screenplay, and any sense of playfulness he might have in the sepia sequence disappears as soon as he arrives in Oz. Visual references to the MGM film are many, but rather than being familiar little nods, they almost railroad the affair, with the creatives trying to fit the story around them, and coming across as lame and on-the-nose. There are even sequences lifted straight from it, a tricky exercise considering that classic is most definitely under copyright. It smacks of a film just trying to be another film. The narrative is pretty poor and uninteresting, offering no real tension to drive the film forward, and hammy dialogue that incites groan after groan. It builds to a battle-style finale that falls entirely flat, causing the film to peter out rather than build to a rousing end. Everything about the craft behind ‘Oz’ feels half-baked, from the visual effects that never advance further than simply being effects, to Danny Elfman’s pedestrian score, a far cry from the excellent work he had done on ‘Alice’. Even the competent 3D can’t conjure any magic here.