Saw Oz the Great and Powerful, a Disney film about how the great Wizard of Oz came to be the Wizard. It stars this guy who is a huckster of some kind, smilingly seducing women with cheap music boxes and sentimental stories about his grandparents. After gleefully philandering and cheating his way through circus-life, he winds up in Oz where he uses his rapscallionery to save the day (uh... spoiler alert I guess.)
The film's main reason to exist is as a visual-conveying mechanism. The film was shot in 3d and there's scenes of glorious bell-flowers swaying in your face. The visuals are pretty great, but they have this strange, video-game quality to them. Like, in the bell-flower scene, there's nothing behind the flowers. Maybe it's different in 3d, but in 3d, it feels like I'm seeing the out of bounds map in a game, all foggy and flat. The film generally feels that way: lush in the center of the image, but spare around the edges.
Anyway, the plot is there too: there's some business about the witches vying for power and talismans of power and so forth. Like the Oz books, they're mostly world-building for the sake of world-building. They don't pedantically explain everything at least, but then I continue to not care very much who the reigning Wizard might be.
The film cam out in 2013 and feels very different post-2016. The impish conman character is more fun in the abstract, where you can imagine yourself doing those things. It's less fun to see him seize power in a fictional country when there's currently a much-less-fun lying conman running the country in actual real life. I was very annoyed at the main character throughout the film but ignored him for the sake of the scenery which was also a little disappointing.
All in all a disappointing movie for me. I suspect kids would love it since it's colorful and straightforward, but it wasn't as fun as I was hoping, wasn't as creative. It may be a victim of my high expectations, but I didn't like it.
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