We’re fascinated with darkening things up these days. We like our superhero movies serious. George Lucas based a children’s sci-fi trilogy on a boy’s descent into evil. No one goes to a Halloween party dressed as Jamie Lee Curtis. And there’s the scary fairy tale update. This reinterpretation of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty puts a fallen fairy front and centre, which wouldn’t have happened in Walt’s day. While it might be a darker than the 1959 outing, however, it’s an altogether warmer version too.
Once a good fairy, Maleficent (Jolie) turns to the dark side when the king’s son, and Maleficent’s friend, Stefan (Copley), robs Maleficent of her wings in an attempt to impress his dying father. In shock, Maleficent swears revenge and waits until the birth of Stefan’s daughter Aurora (who grows up to be Elle Fanning) to cast a terrible spell: if she pricks her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel before sundown on her sixteenth birthday she will fall into a sleep that will only be lifted with true love’s first kiss…
Bar a lengthy set-up and a fleshed-out backstory Maleficent still makes shapes to follow the original…until it takes an unexpected turn. The Aurora/Prince (Brenton Thwaites) love story makes way for the emerging mother-daughter relationship between the unwilling Maleficent, trying to keep Aurora alive until her sixteenth birthday and maximise her father’s distress, and the oblivious Aurora, who believes Maleficent is her benevolent godmother. "The story is not quite the one you were told," goes one of the last lines. You got that right.
Unsure when Maleficent is all sweetness and light, Jolie grows into the character when asked to be badness personified. All piercing eyes and cheekbones, she’s enjoys herself here. Copley, taking the Bad One role as serious as Charlize Theron did in 2012’s darker take of Snow White, is great but they miss a trick with his Stefan. When stealing her wings he chooses not to kill Maleficent when he has the chance, and his obsession with keeping Aurora safe drives him to insanity, which suggests that he too is good underneath the bluster, but wonderfully-named writer Linda Woolverton (Alice In Wonderland), after going to the hassle of writing all that in, decides to leave it and turn Stefan into Mad Bearded King #205. Shame.
But this is a meatier and gloomier looking affair than the one you know. Yes there’s some padding afoot in the middle, and yes the heavy use of narration can feel like the movie is being read to you at times, but this is as worthy a reinterpretation you’ll see.