OZ

I was going to write a blurb on the movie ‘OZ the Great and Powerful’, but thought it required more than just a few words.  OZ was a good, not a great movie.  I enjoyed it, but upon reflection thought it was doomed from the start.  OZ suffers from three divergent examples of cannon in the land of OZ.

First of all, there is the 1939 classic movie, which is loosely based on the L. Frank Baum novel.  The original movie was, and continues to be, a classic.  The Baum novels should be the definitive cannon for any OZ story, but the original movie overshadows those novels in the popular mindset.  More recently, Wicked, the story of the wicked witch, has essentially become cannon in the popular culture.

So, when OZ, the Great and Powerful hit the streets, it starts off from a point where the audience has multiple expectations that are almost guaranteed to not be met.  OZ acts like a straight up prequel to the 1939 movie with a few items cherry picked from the Baum novels, and it almost works.  One of the major obstacles is that the 1939 movie is owned by Warner Bros. and this movie is produced by Disney and Disney couldn’t buy the rights to the movie.  Therefore, there was no mention of the Ruby Slippers in OZ and the color palate of the new movie was slightly off of the original.  Therefore, the movie doesn’t work as a straight prequel.

Recently, the story of Wicked has entered the pop culture psyche as the unofficial prequel to The Wizard of OZ, and this movie does nothing to even try to acknowledge that work.  The acting in OZ isn’t bad.  I like all of the leads, although Mila Kunis isn’t great when she starts cackling (and it pains me to say so, because I love Mila Kunis).

Therefore, OZ is okay, but not great, but I think that it was doomed from the start.