I watched it yesterday, and was extremely impressed. It was nothing revelatory, but I wasn’t expecting that. It was an extremely entertaining, well written and acted film, with plenty of references to the original. Apart from the CGI, it was a pretty old fashioned feeling film, in a good way.
The CGI will probably be the biggest thing that divides people on the film. I thought it was excellent overall, and extremely beautiful in places, but did sometimes look almost like video game scenery.
Overall, 8/10. It was always going to suffer in comparison to the original, and many of the characters are less memorable, but overall it’s a worthy prequel, and a damn good film in it’s own right.
i agree with everything Steophan said, more under the box:
[spoiler]i liked the design of the emerald city, munchkinland, the dark forest-they were recognizable but still original. although some of the night scenes in the emerald city reminded me a lot of coruscant.
overall, i loved the look of oz as a world. i got no real lord of the rings or narnia or [insert fantasy world here] vibes; it had a very unique look of its own.
i liked franco quite a bit, and zach braff and michelle williams. lots of references to the garland movie, some subtle, some not.
i liked mila kunis, for the most part, but her witch is a bit of a letdown. i liked the design, but she’s a little too petulant and whiny to be scary. i’m not sure if she was trying to channel margaret hamilton or what. hamilton’s performance was campy, but she had some moments of genuine intimidation. i didn’t really get that from kunis. there’s some cleverness behind her transformation and her motivation-she literally turns green from jealousy. i would have liked the transformation to be a little more built up, though.
the movie is by the numbers, and there are the usual storytelling cliches. you’ll see pretty much everything coming, and if you go in expecting the same charm as the '39 film, you’ll be disappointed. but it’s got a certain magic of its own, and as someone who loves oz and considers the wizard of oz to be my favorite movie of all time, i enjoyed it quite a bit. i’m glad i saw it in theaters.[/spoiler]
I was bored (and actually fell asleep for a few minutes somewhere in the middle…) The plot wasn’t terrible and I even kind of liked the ending, but I can’t be the only one who felt that the casting was just… off.
I didn’t like James Franco at all… this would’ve been a great role for someone like Gene Wilder circa 1975-- wacky and unpredictable but still charming. I didn’t think Michelle Williams was a good choice either, just too bland and mush-mouthed to be an effective Glinda.
-shrug- I don’t feel like I wasted my money (well, I didn’t pay) but I had higher hopes for this one…
Overall, I would agree with the 6/10. I saw the 2D version and thought it might be more enjoyable in 3D, but it gives my wife headaches, so I was stuck in 2D. I wouldn’t pay to see it again in 3D.
When Oz finally gets to… well, Oz, Danny Elfman’s Danny-Elfman-esque* score really kicks in. Looking at all the scenery, I kept wondering if Tim Burton changed his name to Sam Raimi. I wouldn’t have been surprised to Jack Skellington peeping out from behind a rock or something.
*Danny Elfman can be subtle. But most of the time he seems to go for creepy circus music that’s almost a signature for him.
I saw this over the weekend and it was just OK. The 3D was excellent and the FX and visuals were really impressive. The story was a little on the thin and predictable side, but all in all I found it mostly satisfying.
The voice acting was very good, the regular acting sucked. Both Franco and Kunis were outright bad, campy in a bad way, and everyone else was just so so. Most of the supporting characters were either wooden or straight out of a school play. Not sure what happened here, but the acting was so bad across the board that I have to think the direction was abysmal.
It felt like Sam Raimi to me. There was an awkward male protagonist trying to have a relationship with an impossibly pure, sweet woman, while he concealed a secret from her. There were POV shots of projectiles hurling toward a target. There was a person forced to dance by evil magic. There was a tone of sweet, genuine wonder; that’s Raimi to a T.
I’d give it 7 of 10, maybe 7.5. The most offputting thing was the craptastic ‘things jumping towards the audience” bad Special effects, done for 3D. :mad:
But I liked the story, it came very close to canon, kept everything very Baum-like.
I really think bad casting hurt this movie.
[ul]
[li]I like James Franco, I think he is a good actor . . . and he really didn’t belong in this role.[/li][li]I like Mila Kunis, I think she is a good actress . . . and she really didn’t belong in this role (and she was HORRIBLE in the second half of the movie).[/li][li]Michelle Williams . . . I think she was miscast but she’s such a brilliant actress that she pulled it off quite well.[/li][li]Rachel Weisz was appropriately cast, but the script and/or direction didn’t really allow her to shine.[/li][/ul]
Expensive movies try to put a big name star in every role because big name stars put asses in seats. For Franco and Kunis, I can’t off the top of my head think of any big name stars that would have been great but if casting were open to unknowns then surely there’d be plenty of substitutes that could have been good. But that’s the trap of expensive productions: they need to sell lots of tickets to make a profit so they have to cast big name stars as the leads so then they’re restricted to a much smaller pool of talent.
I thought it was a pretty good movie. I liked it. The casting is a major point against it, though.
(My other complaint is that all the actresses almost looked like they were CGI themselves- almost as if they performed motion capture kinda like Angelina Jolie in the motion capture / animated Beowulf movie from a few years ago. For all of them, their faces their skin their complexions were too perfect- as if these actresses weren’t all beautiful in real life so the special effects team had to pretty them up. Anyone else feel this way???)
I think it would have been about 100x better had it been a Burton/Depp production - it just moved so …s…l…o…w…l…y.
The effects done ‘for 3d’ were so obnoxious it wsa not funny (we saw it in 2d) - And the walking down the path and yellowbrick road had a very greenscreen/obvioously real people on top of animation feel to it - ‘Song of the South’ came to mind as having been better done. I never once ‘lost myself’ in the film.
Simwife and I both fought hard to not fall asleep, at one point, she asked me if I should go stand up at the back of the theatre.
It’s one of the few of this type of film that we both said ‘once was enough, absolutely no reason to pick up the disc’.
I saw it on Saturday night. It wasn’t bad, but I do think Franco was the wrong actor for the role. It was nice to see the nods to the 1939 movie and to the books (like having the Tinkers and Quadlings show up). I thought the set design was really good though - it looked hyper-colorful like the 1939 film. I thought the three witches were all good. I mean the actresses were good, obviously only Glenda was a good witch.
Agree that the jump-at-you 3D gimmicks were distracting and unfortunate. I hate that.
*Wicked *is a book. It bears only a superficial plot resemblance and some character names with the musical Wicked. They’re about as closely related as most Stephen King novels and their movies of the same names. I liked the book, I was bored and hostile to the musical (and I LOVE musicals.)
As others have said, despite the 3D, I felt like I couldn’t get “into” this movie. It felt flat, literally, like old oil painting backdrops two feet behind the actors. Which, I suppose, means that at least it didn’t feel quite as bad as a greenscreen backdrop two feet behind the actors, but not by much.
The 3D was used in the weakest way possible - to startle. About the only exception to this, and one I really really liked, was early on in the film when (spoiler is not about plot, but cinemetography or direction or something more like that. I spoiler it because the surprise of it delighted me, although I’ve since seen it mentioned in reviews, so it’s not top secret):
the picture is 3:4 or so - not “widescreen”, in other words - and bits were flying out past the “frame”. I think it was probably during the tornado, but it was all so unmemorable, I really could tell you for sure. But it did catch my eye, and was a wonder unlike any of the “wonders” later in the film.
Thematically, I’m trying to think of when I’ve seen a more horrid set of morals upheld as virtuous in a “kids” movie. Including some horndoggy horndoggedness and an astounding lack of respect for women. And no, he doesn’t learn his lesson or change his ways at all, he’s just temporarily distracted with immanent death. And a side dish of “Woman, without her man, is nothing.” :rolleyes:
I actually like James Franco, or I have in the past. He’s usually one charming little mo-fo. I felt like this was James Franco’s twin brother trying to do a James Franco impression and falling short. The acting was pretty B-movie horrible all 'round, with the exception of The China Girl. Goodness gracious, when a child voiced CG animation is the best actor and most interesting character in your movie, it might be time for some recasting.
The costumes were absolutely gorgeous. Gorgeous. Wouldn’t change a thing. I want Glinda’s tiara, and I want it NOW!
In the Kansas scene at the beginning, did anyone notice that the unseen man who proposed to the Michelle Williams character - whom Oz described as “a good man” - his last name was Gale?
I did notice that and I’m ambivalent about whether or not I wanted Michelle Williams’s Kansas character to be “Emily” and the man who proposed “Henry” or whether that would just have been too much pat legacy-borrowing.
Yep, I thought that was a nice touch. It means, of course, that Glinda in The Wizard Of Oz is the representation of Dorothy’s mother, which would work perfectly.
Stupid question for those familiar with the books - is it ever explained why Dorothy lives with her Aunt and Uncle?
The idea that Annie and John were supposed to be Dorothy’s parents never even occurred to me. I think because Dorothy’s parents are such a null set in Ozzery…they’re barely mentioned in the books and don’t even come up in the 1939 movie. Dorothy is just an orphan from the beginning of the Oz books.
