NOT More Faithful to the Books
This movie was a poorly executed mashup of two books that took elements from both stories without ever producing a coherent story of its own. The main villain of the movie was a combination of the evil witch Mombi who was a hag and the vain and temperamental but beautiful Princess Langwidere that Baum presented as normally being friendly enough, just spoiled and selfish. In the book, Mombi wanted to be powerful and didn't care who she hurt in her quest for power; once Langwidere's temper cooled off, she was very ready to release Dorothy from her tower imprisonment and was eager to have her relatives rescued so she could quit having to deal with the hassle of ruling. Why the guys who wrote this script thought it would be a good idea to combine such vastly different characters is a complete mystery. Then the movie writers/directors/producers threw in a dose of Nurse Ratched on top of that, turning the character into an inconsistent, muddled mess.
No matter how much you complain about the characters in the Judy Garland movie breaking into song, that movie followed the original story on which it was based much more closely than this movie did, at least right up until the end when Dorothy's trip turned out to be a dream. If you ignore the last few minutes of the movie that show Dorothy waking up, you pretty much have the story from the book, and if you're going to discount the entire movie for the last few minutes, I can't help you.
I'm also getting tired of all the people claiming that this movie is more representative of the books because the movie is so dark. Baum's stories were the antithesis of dark. Yes, there were a few things that have some rather disturbing implications if you think about them too much, such as the little matter of how someone got a collection of living heads with no bodies in the first place. But honestly, the books were light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek fun that no one was expected to take so seriously. He threw in whatever clever ideas he had without worrying overmuch whether he was being consistent or realistic. His typical approach to unfortunate implications seems to have been to gloss over them and hope no one noticed.
Baum never was very good at working out all the implications of his own ideas. That's why the first time he introduced Glinda's magic book, it wasn't even magic; it was merely a regular book in which she wrote down all the information her spies had ferreted out. Then in the next story in which it's mentioned, it's suddenly a magic tome that automatically records every single thing done by every single person everywhere in the world down to the smallest detail of a child stamping his foot in anger. With the next story that mentioned the magic book, someone had clearly pointed out to Baum just how massive that would make the book, how impossible it would be to find any specific information in it, and how if Glinda could find whatever information she wanted in the book, no one would ever be able to surprise Glinda again, which means that all of the villain plans in subsequent stories would be thwarted before they got past the planning stages, making for very dull stories indeed. So in Baum's next story that mentioned Glinda's magic book, the magic book only gave a brief outline of major events with few details. He also glossed over the fact that every time Ozma used her magic picture to check in on Dorothy, Ozma ran the risk of catching Dorothy in the act of using the outhouse, and that picture had been owned for many years by the villainous Nome King and could be used by anyone who walked past it in Ozma's palace.
Now, I have no objection to dark stories. But if you're thinking that making a reimagining of Oz dark makes it more true to the inconsistent, light-hearted nonsense that was Baum's land of Oz, you never understood the books.
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Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.