Oz The Great and Powerful

Oz the Great and Powerful

Overall rating: 3.5 stars

It may not have the charm and dazzle of the wonderful original, but Oz the Great and Powerful is funny, visually potent (besides the green screen) and the power of the source material carries it through nicely.

The Good

This is an adaptation of one of L. Frank Baum's glorious Oz novels. They're great to read, particularly if you can stomach fourteen of them. Although this one doesn't translate to the screen as well as the previous 1939 adaptation, it's still a joy to look at and the costumes and world are well designed, both practically and graphically.

There's also a bit of humour and charm too, provided mostly by two key characters: Finlay the monkey (voiced excellently by Zack Braff) and China Girl, a brilliant piece of design. 

Sam Raimi provides decent direction too. I loved the transition from black and white to colour and the change of screen ratios when Oscar enters Oz.

The Bad

I love Rachel Weisz's Evanora and Michelle William's Glinda, but casting Mila Kunis as Theodora was a tragic mistake. Kunis has never been particularly great as an actress and she exhibits that here. As does Franco, who delivers cheesy grin after cheesy grin and delivers his dialogue poorly. 

Then the biggest problem is the green screen. It's pretty bad. There's a clear problem there. Maybe it's the outrageous design of Oz, or a technical fault, but it bugged me throughout the whole movie. It made the characters feel less real and a lot more distance, a big problem for a family movie.

To Conclude

It's great to see Oz on screen again, with lots of visual sparkle and plenty of humour and likeable characters, but a few casting problems and the green screen limit the praise this film can get. It's enjoyable enough, but there's a few issues to sort out for the inevitable sequel.