Anyway.... I saw it (!) in RealD 3D this afternoon.
I'm not really sure where all the hate is coming from. No, it's not the best movie I've seen. The best way I can say it is that it's like "Snow White and the Huntsman" quality w/ Jolie then added in to knock it up another level. If Jolie hadn't been in it, it would have been rather flat, but she elevates the movie.
I'll say a little here but keep it pretty vague, and keep the specifics in spoilers.
I think a lot of negativity is coming in that "Sleeping Beauty" is pretty much a black and white, stereotypical and gendered fairy tale. One of the cool things about the character Maleficent in THAT movie is that she's unabashedly evil and unapologetic; sometimes you just want a starkly, competently, crisply evil person as your villain. But you're not going to make a Disney movie aimed at 20-year-old girls on a one-note evil Disney villain; you have no choice but to make the character more complex and nuanced in some way. (Otherwise you'd be making a rated R indie fantasy horror flick.) Changes were necessary to make it work. And remember that the name Maleficent is a combination of a negative and a positive -- malevolent and magnificent. This movie's eponymous character is both, she has two sides to herself that layer into one individual.
So one should view this movie as someone else's riff on the basic characters and plot points of the old Disney movie. This Maleficent is still very dangerous and can be very coolly wicked when properly motivated, but she's got more going on in her life than just being the "mistress of evil"; she has loves and loathings in her life, she has past experiences that contribute to her current behavior, she's been happy and she's been hurt. and this leads to some really INTERESTING exchanges in the time period that the animated movie skipped (where Aurora is one day a baby and the next suddenly she's 16). Some of those scenes are among my favorite. You get the sense that Maleficent (despite being a fae creature) is also kind of human in that she isn't necessarily out to destroy and hurt all the time, yet she does enjoy feeling like she has power and agency to make things happen -- it feeds her ego, good and bad, she likes to toy with things just because she can. (Feeling capable and competent isn't necessarily a bad thing.) Maybe we can talk about those in spoilers or after more people have seen the movie.
this is also not a man's movie; men in general come off pretty poorly or at least irrelevant. The strongest male presence is not a sympathetic character, and almost all of the other characters are female... some strong, some weak, some goofy and incompetent, but still pretty much occupying the center of the movie.
I was able to guess the few main twists in the movie before they happened, but I think they still added positively to the movie. I also laughed a number of times; Jolie's dry deadpan is delicious to hear in the ear as well as see on her face. She was really wonderful. The movie would rate on the negative end without her, but she pulls it into the realm of the positive, similar to how Charlize Theron elevated SW & Huntsman but not quite as much as Jolie was able to elevate this movie.
Are her cheekbones digitally enhanced or something?
They look like they're gonna cut through her skin.
Yeah, I read they had used makeup on her. They were definitely enhanced either way and are very sharp. Maleficent always was Fae even in the old movie, but this movie really brings it out and it's very very obvious. She seems rather otherworldly even in moments where you might not have categorized her as "evil" per se... and very very dangerous as the fae can be.
