For years Maleficent was seen as one of the best villains Disney had ever made.
So when I heard about this movie I was excited to see the evil witch come back in live action.
Instead we got Maleficent being the hero through contrived events.
Why couldn't they just let Maleficent be evil? Why go through all these hoops to not only rationalize her actions but turn her into the good guy?
This movie was a massive disappointment.
I like the fact that Maleficent was changed. There are so many movies where a character is just evil or just good. I think they made Maleficent more realistic by making her this way.
If anybody in this movie could have used a little more work it would have been Stefan in my opinion. I would have enjoyed it better if they could have developed him a little more to show his desire to be the king and his transition that made him willing to do what he did to Maleficent.
Why do people think that people being just good or just evil are unrealistic? There are plenty of real life people who actually were JUST evil. Like Marquis de Sade, or Karl Marx, or Jean Paul Sartre. Heck, Red Skull actually had several similarities to some rather notorious Nazi war criminals, and it's clear that the writers wouldn't have even known about those war criminals at the time they made the comic Captain America. That's not a reason to FUBAR the Mistress of All Evil.
shareKarl Marx was evil.... I suppose it's realistic that some people are just stupid.
The idea that a man who works his ass off in the fields or the mines should be paid a wage and have a standard of living nearing that of a man who sits at a desk in a bank is what you think of as evil. That when that man having worked his entire adult life retires and is no longer to work to provide for himself that his contributions to the communal good should allow him to be able to live with dignity and not worry about having the bank come take his house or what he's going to eat for dinner or that he might get sick and can't go to the doctor.
That's what you call evil
People are not born evil. The Red Skull isn't even a real person. Why am I wasting my time typing this. You probably think that Nazi's were socialists because you don't even know what socialism really is or what nazism was either.
Karl Marx was evil.... I suppose it's realistic that some people are just stupid.
The idea that a man who works his ass off in the fields or the mines should be paid a wage and have a standard of living nearing that of a man who sits at a desk in a bank is what you think of as evil. That when that man having worked his entire adult life retires and is no longer to work to provide for himself that his contributions to the communal good should allow him to be able to live with dignity and not worry about having the bank come take his house or what he's going to eat for dinner or that he might get sick and can't go to the doctor.
That's what you call evil
People are not born evil. The Red Skull isn't even a real person.
Why am I wasting my time typing this. You probably think that Nazi's were socialists because you don't even know what socialism really is or what nazism was either.
The DPRK is an acronym. So you're telling me North Korea is a democracy. Hitler hated socialism and communism. It's kind of what cost him the war. You remember the whole turning on Stalin part? The NAZI's were a nationalist fascist state ran by a military dictatorship. Maybe you should look up what Hitler felt about communism at some point in your life.
You say the Marquis De Sade was born evil because he was a sociopath. Really, thanks Freud. So he was burning puppies straight out of the crib was he? Or do you know next to nothing of his childhood and just state that he was always insane and not a product of his environment. That maybe he was just raised badly.
All this because you injected your political slant into a movie post....
Keep running with your little right wing hate fest then. Keep calling the other side names and sounding like a clown. It apparently makes you think you're better somehow.
FYI, revolutions are bloody. Maybe you should read up on the American Revolution at some point. Calling them what they are doesn't mean you revel in it. However, I get the feeling you hold up the founding fathers to some kind of sainted ideal as opposed to greedy power grubbing rich guys they were who led an army of the poor to slaughter so they could get that power.
The DPRK is an acronym. So you're telling me North Korea is a democracy. Hitler hated socialism and communism. It's kind of what cost him the war. You remember the whole turning on Stalin part? The NAZI's were a nationalist fascist state ran by a military dictatorship. Maybe you should look up what Hitler felt about communism at some point in your life.
You say the Marquis De Sade was born evil because he was a sociopath. Really, thanks Freud. So he was burning puppies straight out of the crib was he? Or do you know next to nothing of his childhood and just state that he was always insane and not a product of his environment. That maybe he was just raised badly.
All this because you injected your political slant into a movie post....
Keep running with your little right wing hate fest then. Keep calling the other side names and sounding like a clown. It apparently makes you think you're better somehow.
FYI, revolutions are bloody. Maybe you should read up on the American Revolution at some point. Calling them what they are doesn't mean you revel in it. However, I get the feeling you hold up the founding fathers to some kind of sainted ideal as opposed to greedy power grubbing rich guys they were who led an army of the poor to slaughter so they could get that power.
The word socialist was PR. It was propaganda. That's all it was. A word they used to try and appeal to the common man. In fact, Hitler held no socialist views. He and the nazi party were sponsored by rich industrialists. Before he was elected the brownshirts actively broke up union strikes at the behest of their rich capitalist benefactors. One of the very first things Hitler did when elected was destroy the unions. The workers were immediately silenced and marginalized. The rich capitalists who funded the party were rewarded with huge government contracts to build the nazi war machine.
Maybe you really need to look into this subject a bit more. It wasn't that Stalin was to socialist. It's that Hitler was not a socialist at all. He was pro industry but not pro worker. He just pretended to be to get broad appeal and votes. Then, much like happens here time after time, once elected he bailed on all his promises except the crazy extreme ones. Oh, and the ones he made to the guys who bankrolled him.
Hitler was pro capitalism and kept private industry alive and well during the entire war. Maybe you out to watch Schindler's List at some point and pay attention to what's going on. He was also pro-gun. The only guns that he ever took were from the Jews. Hell, once the war started and the draft began he was passing them out. Hitler loved guns. He had MANY MANY MANY made.
Actually, Hitler was NOT pro-capitalism, and he was also not pro-gun either. If anything, he tried to force various people to give UP their guns (not just the Jews, but also ANYONE who was a threat to his power. Being pro-gun means letting EVERYONE actually have the right to defend themselves and actually letting everyone in the population regardless of race, creed, or anything like that have a gun), and he talked badly about capitalism frequently, even while he WAS in power. Being pro-gun is more than just handing out guns to people. Heck, Eric Holder and the Obama Administration freely handed out guns to drug cartels without any trackers, and last I checked, they were anti-gun. And yes, Hitler was indeed pro-socialist. And please don't give me the whole "it was just PR to trick people into electing him." As soon as he consolidated enough power to be untouchable, if it truly were just a trick, he would have actually made sure to change the name from "NAZI" to something more explicitly anti-Socialist specifically to emphasize that he was never socialist and he sold a bridge in Brooklyn to them, to borrow a euphemism. Think along the lines about how Thomas Jefferson promised as part of his campaign that he would end federalism, yet as soon as he got elected, he then declared "we're all federalists now!" and explicitly broke his promise by not only continuing federalism, but actually doubling down on it even more than his predecessor John Adams, or how Woodrow Wilson promised he wouldn't get people into World War I, yet then he explicitly broke his promise after getting elected.
shareMaybe because people aren't just evil without any reasons?
shareMost people aren't, but there are people who just do cruel things for no reason other than their own enjoyment.
shareMaleficent isn't a person though. She is a faerie.
shareMaybe because people aren't just evil without any reasons?
Then give her a reason to be evil, don't just give her a heart of gold and make her entirely a victim and a hero
shareI completely agree. Maleficent should have been evil in this film.
And no, she was NOT given layers in this film at all. This "Maleficent" or whoever she is is even more one-dimensional than the rest of you complain about her being in Sleeping Beauty.
What this movie did was defeat the point of her character to begin with.
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I'm not saying they couldn't have given depth to the character of Maleficent, but the things they did to the other characters stole whatever depth she had by making them so cartoonishly either evil or incompetent that her character suffered for it.
They could have made her an evil like Frolo in Hunchback, where I think Disney made one of their best villains. Instead they made the king evil, the good fairies incompetent, and Maleficent through no real development someone who actively has to keep her target from getting killed by said incompetence of the good fairies.
I'm asking why couldn't they have made a movie where Maleficent saw all the evil mankind committed and turned evil from that? Where she was actively evil? Why did they need to make her the good guy? Heck why couldn't they have made a movie about her descent into evil? That would have been a much better movie. Instead we got a forced reversal of the fairy tale roles.
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I agree that the old king was evil, but Stephan was obviously power hungry from the very beginning (someday I will live there) as well as a thief (the morality of that can be debated with equally valid points coming from both sides of the argument, in my opinion.)
I guess my overall point is that Stephan was greedy and selfish, two of the hallmarks in judging people as if not evil, then definitely bad.
"I do not like mixing up moralities and mathematics."
Churchill
They could have made her an evil like Frolo in Hunchback, where I think Disney made one of their best villains. Instead they made the king evil, the good fairies incompetent, and Maleficent through no real development someone who actively has to keep her target from getting killed by said incompetence of the good fairies.That is completely false. Maleficent was very developed in this movie. She is also developed in a realistic manner in the movie. The fairies are use to living in the Moors where they know nothing about raising humans so they will obviously be incompetent in the process of raising Aurora as a child.
"Realistic?" You use that word, I'm not sure you understand its meaning. And I wasn't talking about just their incompetence at raising Aurora, but their competence at doing anything period.
This movie tried too hard to be another Wicked, and failed miserably by making all the characters too cartoony to be taken in any way seriously.
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"Realistic?" You use that word, I'm not sure you understand its meaning.I understand the meaning of "Realistic" far better than you can determine how any movie plot should go. Your definition of "Evil" makes the movie into some kind of recording of a video game.
And I wasn't talking about just their incompetence at raising Aurora, but their competence at doing anything periodMaybe if you had half watched the movie you would note that 95% of their presence in the movie was in front of humans which is where they are incompetent. There is only one scene of them in the Moors.
This movie tried too hard to be another Wicked, and failed miserably by making all the characters too cartoony to be taken in any way seriously.Says the guy who wants to turn the movie into a lifeless video game-like movie where evil fights good. share
You're the one putting words in my mouth. You're the one excusing poor character development.
And you forgive their incompetence when the only other being in front of them is Aurora. And their incompetence when they almost get her killed through neglect. So stop making excuses for them and just acknowledge that the movie had a major hate-on for the good fairies.
I never said I wanted it to be a video-game. I said I would have preferred a movie in which the character development was realistic, the characters fleshed out, and the antagonists more then being bad guys one could find on a Saturday morning cartoon.
You're the one making excuses for it.
Because that's boring.
'Well I've got two words for you - STFU'
^Nailed it. It's like saying "why couldn't Darth Vader just be a guy who goes around choking people?" or "why couldn't Michael Corleone just love being a mafia boss?" Kinda defeats the whole purpose of telling a captivating story.
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Watch the source material. The original movie, "Sleeping Beauty," and you'll see that while slightly one-dimensional Maleficent was great in that movie.
If we had gotten a movie that had shown how she became "that" instead of what basically amounted to an excuse for her evilness by placing all the blame on the king, then the movie would have been so much better then what we got. Instead we got a boring "good" villain story. In which the villain isn't actually a villain and all the things she does are excused by how evil other people are.
You say that's interesting. I say that's more boring then the original "Sleeping Beauty." And "Sleeping Beauty" while a classic is a fairly straightforward story.
It feels more like Sleeping Beauty fan fiction. I'm personally annoyed at so many stories going "oh they're not really evil - it's all this person's fault". The TV show Once Upon A Time gave Maleficent a form of redemption but it at least felt better paced. They didn't ignore her evil deeds but they still gave her a realistic redemption.
Here Maleficent only becomes evil because of something an evil man did to her, and even then they turn heroic characters into idiots just so Maleficent can look even better.
It feels more like Sleeping Beauty fan fiction.
Man, you've got bad fanfiction alright. And I've seen fanfiction that was FAR better written and a LOT more believable than this trash (like Goku's Wish: Return of Broly, or Worthy of Legends, or even Biohazard Rashashka. They dealt with Broly (and in the case of Rashashka, Wesker) reforming or at least becoming not as bad as their canon counterparts in a FAR more believable manner than Maleficent ever did.).
It's funny, the cheapquels got killed off partially at John Lasseter's request largely because he decried them as "bad fanfiction", yet even the worst of them were FAR better written than the current fare of Disney stuff like Descendants or the Maleficent film.
Then again, at D23 in 2010, Don Hahn basically made his low opinion of storytelling clear by saying the concept is... well, basically it's a pile of bull excrement, so I doubt we can expect any better stories to come out any time soon. At least, that's what I heard.
I find it hilarious you belive all of these Disney fiction are supposed to exist in the same universe, Maybe Disneyy have more respect for creators than we thought. Do you think Disneyland will ever portray Peter Pan as a villain like Once Upon A Time, a show that they continue to greenlight season after season?
shareI find it hilarious you belive all of these Disney fiction are supposed to exist in the same universe
Maybe Disneyy have more respect for creators than we thought.
Do you think Disneyland will ever portray Peter Pan as a villain like Once Upon A Time, a show that they continue to greenlight season after season?
Well, since you mentioned the F-Word (fan-fiction), I'll second it.
Ron the Death Eater: a fan-fiction trope where a good guy either has his negative traits overplayed, or is just made evil, usually to justify the writer's preferred pairing.
Draco in Leather Pants: a fan-fiction trope where a bad guy has his negative traits downplayed or ignored, usually to justify the writer's preferred pairing.
Don't get me wrong: I love cheesy AU pairings, including Malora, as much as anyone, but if they're going to make a redemption story part of the Disney canon, they should avoid these types of tropes, IMO.
Also, it's possible to write redemption stories that completely avoid RtDE or DiLP, and actually confront the character's misdeeds head on. I still reread my three favorite Gaston stories at least once a year.
Agreed fully with that. The best fanfics dealing with a bad character turning good are the ones where said bad guys actually go through a believable redemption arc. That's also one of the reasons why I thought Zoe-Wesker's Albert Wesker fanfics were pretty good, since it stayed true to his characterization in the Resident Evil series, yet at the same time, she also has him redeem himself slightly in a manner that actually works (and her characterization of the characters who are antagonists in the fanfic yet heroes in the canon is also believable as well and staying true to their characterizations.). I also thought Worthy of Legends and Goku's Wish: The Return of Broly's fanfics actually WORKED very well regarding how they handled Broly, considering that in the first one, the direct influence on how Broly was driven insane the Saiyans had made sure to avert (moving Broly away from Goku), and the latter had Goku wishing Broly's evil nature away when reviving him, not to mention there's currently an arc for Broly right now where he fears some trace of his evil was not wiped out thanks to a nightmare he had. With the exception of Zoe-Wesker's fanfics, though, none of them are AU pairings, BTW.
And honestly, if they really wanted to make Maleficent evil due to tragic circumstances, they should have written her like Alan Moore wrote the Joker in Batman: The Killing Joke. Now that's a tragic villain gone Complete Monster done right in Joker's case (and let's face it, Maleficent IS a complete monster in the original film, and I'd argue with quite a few valid citations that she's far more of a monster than Claude Frollo can ever hope to be).
And on the topic of stuff to avoid regarding writing fanfics or, heck, any stories at all, I'd list a few other stuff as well:
*Creator's Pet
*Author Avatar (since it has a tendency to go in line with Creator's Pet. Brian Griffin's a rather notorious example of how bad Author Avatars generally end up becoming)
*The Scrappy
*Unintentionally Sympathetic
*Unintentionally Unsympathetic
Actually, to be honest, I'm planning to write a few fanfics myself relating to the triplets from BATB, largely to expose the French Revolution as horrible. Since they were never depicted as actually being bad in the film, I'll avoid Draco in Leather Pants with them easily (ironically, they came across as Ron the Death Eater in the Marvel Comics). However, I'm at the same time hesitant on how to write it, since I want to avoid those above listed tropes (well, granted, I don't generally insert myself into the characters at all, so maybe Author Avatar won't be a concern, but the others definitely will be a problem). And I need to make sure the fanfic actually works in order to spread the message that the French Revolution, even before the Reign of Terror, was an awful area, since I know the public school system will NEVER treat the French Revolution with scorn (at best, they'd only decry the Reign of Terror, if even that. I know from personal experience). And while with the sequel I may have Belle become a Jacobin, that's not due to RtDE so much as realizing that with her characterization in the film, that's the logical approach for her future given that nothing else arrives to directly conflict with that.
Watch the source material. The original movie, "Sleeping Beauty," and you'll see that while slightly one-dimensional Maleficent was great in that movie.
If we had gotten a movie that had shown how she became "that" instead of what basically amounted to an excuse for her evilness by placing all the blame on the king, then the movie would have been so much better then what we got.
I did say slightly one-dimensional. Her evilness was kind of all she was known for, and while I personally loved it, other people have raised the complaint that just being evil is too one-dimensional.
shareYou know, there are such things as one-dimensional villains in real life, like the Marquis de Sade, for example (and believe me, he definitely has at least one quote more than making clear he was one-dimensional. Case in point: "Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”), and I could name others as well like Karl Marx. Besides, there were PLENTY of one-dimensional villains who were extremely popular, like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars or Albert Wesker from Resident Evil, or the Joker from Batman, or Kefka from Final Fantasy VI (at least outside Japan).
shareShe should've been evil right to the end. Or at the very least a little longer.
shareThis movie was clearly inspired by the book/play Wicked. That story told us where the wicked witch of the West from Oz came from and why she was considered to be evil. Disney is always ready to cash in on popular trends (hence Enchanted was thrust upon us after the success of Shrek), and thus this move was made.
Personally, I enjoyed Maleficent far more than either Enchanted or Wicked, but that's just me.
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All this movie proves is that women have good reason to inflict harm on innocent babies. It's called THE PATRIARCHY.
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