Oz The (not so) Great & Powerful.

After watching this trailer for the new Oz film I was beyond excited when I went to see it on my Birthday - it looked so exciting, colourful and completely rammed full of magic and adventure! However, it was not at all what I expected.

I went into the cinema with such high hopes and was fully ready to be blown away by the story and visuals to come, but when the movie started I found it to be painfully slow and badly acted. As the beginning of the movie is made to look like an old fashioned film I thought that perhaps the bad acting and slowness was also intentional - to further mirror the old films it was based on - so I remained positive that things would improve once we travelled to the wonderful land of Oz. However, again I was sadly disappointed.

Yes, some of the visuals in the movie are quite nice, but its nothing we haven't seen before. In fact, the landscape of Oz reminded me so much of Tim Burtons 'Alice In Wonderland' that it completely pulled me out of the film. Many of the scenes in 'Oz' are so obviously green/blue-screened that it makes the whole movie look cheap and laughable - the scene where Oz and Glinda are travelling inside bubbles is one very good example of this. I'm hoping that the effects look better on a smaller screen, but on the big cinema screen things just looked far too fake for me. I never truly felt like Oz was a real place in which these characters were adventuring and therefore, couldn't fully immerse myself in the story.

Sadly, the acting remained very wooden throughout the movie and I didn't really care about what happened to any of the characters, with the exception of the china doll (who really was the best part of the whole movie). The character of Oz himself was extremely sleazy and grating, and I certainly didn't grow to like him more as the story progressed, which I guess should have been the case.

I wanted so badly to like this movie, and it had so much wonderful potential, but unfortunately I just couldn't see past its many, many flaws. It seems that film-makers seem to have such trouble with converting fairy tales into films and I'm crossing my fingers so hard that the upcoming Jack The Giant Slayer movie is one that does it right! I'll keep you posted.

(These are my own views and opinions, please don't let them put you off going to see this movie. Who knows, you may absolutely love it and completely disagree with me. Let me know if/what you did like about it - I'd love to have my eyes opened to some good in it.)