Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

7/10

Starring

James Franco

Mila Kunis

Rachel Weisz

Michelle Williams

Directed by Sam Raimi

Oz the Great and Powerful is Disney’s prequel to the 1939 classic movie The Wizard of Oz, and it is set 20 years before the tale of Dorothy Gale’s (Judy Garland) journey into the Land of Oz. The movie characters are based on The Oz series by L. Frank Baum.

The movie is delightful and Disney paid homage to the old classic by starting the introduction of the movie’s main character Oscar "Oz" Diggs (James Franco) in black and white and the moment he stepped into Oz the movie transformed to color, just like that of the 1939 classic which started in sepia tinted black and white, and the moment Dorothy got to Oz the movie transformed into colored.

I enjoyed the colorful bit of the movie I do have to give kudos to the story, it was interesting and involving, I found myself drawn in and the idea that showed that The Wizard of Oz was first truly a con man, a con man of mere magic tricks who travels with a circus, until one day he found himself in the Land of Oz where they await their savior a Wizard so great that he will be able to defeat the witch sisters.

Here our hero comes into Oz as a con man and we get to see him metamorphose into the wizard we know him to be in the The Oz Series.

The movie did face some hiccups during production, some of which were due to the cast having other roles that they had to leave to go fulfill, and then there was the legal rights as Warner Bros owned all the rights to the elements used in the 1939 classic such things like: the color of the wicked witch of the west (here her shade of green differs from the 1939 classic), her mole was not present, the yellow brick road was also nowhere to be seen, although there is a brick road.

Director Sam Raimi and James Franco worked together in the Spiderman trilogy where Franco played Osborne. Here Raimi did an impressive work coordinating the events that took place in this film.

This movie did make reference to the characters in the old classic, like a lady Oz was seeing told him she is getting married to a man whose last name was Gale (Dorothy Gale), we see the creation of the scarecrow, we get to see the men who created the Tin Man and we saw how the cowardly lion became coward when he got frightened away by Oz.

My take on this movie is that it is fun and a nice watch for those who have a mind that is ready to fly.