Year 16, Day 16 - 1/16/24 - Movie #4,616
BEFORE: Peter Serafinowicz carries over from "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget", and I'm back on track, this was going to be the third film with Laurence Fishburne in it, but it just got delayed a day and the chain is still solid.
THE PLOT: Best friends Sophie and Agatha find themselves on opposing sides of an epic battle when they're swept away to an enchanted school where aspiring heroes and villains are trained to protect the balance between Good and Evil.
AFTER: It's so obvious that somebody set this up to be the next "Harry Potter"-type franchise, if you can imagine Hogwarts with a bunch of characters from "Mean Girls" (and/or "Freaks and Geeks") with a bit of the "Hunger Games" fashions thrown in. Yeah, that tracks. But in the "Harry Potter" movies there were four sections at Hogwarts, umm, Slytherin, Griffindor, umm, wait, don't tell me, Ravenclaw and something else. Puff 'n Stuff. Puff Puff Pass. Heffalump, something like that. I'm all around it, aren't I?
This film dumbs that down quite a bit, there are just two houses, "Good" and "Evil". Duh, please tell me the difference, movie, I'll wait. Good will always win, because it's nicer? That's a rather simplistic view of the world, isn't it? Doesn't evil win some of the time, because it's craftier and it WANTS it more? What does it mean to "win", anyway, what are we talking about, because you're going to grow up and get a job and maybe get married and have a kid or two and lose your job or worse, keep on doing that job for 40 years until you get old and die and that doesn't really feel like "winning", does it? Meanwhile things keep getting more expensive and you keep falling behind on the payments and you don't know how you're going to pay for your kids' braces, let alone their college education and nope, doesn't feel like winning at all.
Oh, right, sorry, we're talking about fairy tales, it turns out, not real life. Good always wins in fairy tales not just because it's nicer, but because the kids need to have some kind of resolution for a story so they can drift off to sleep. Well, they all lived happily ever after, THE END, please don't overthink it. The good people won and the bad people died. THE END. No, of course fairy tales aren't real, they're tales. Unless it's a story where the people aren't real either, and they aspire to be fairy tale characters, which means they have to go to SCHOOL to learn how those stories work, and how to maximize their assets to gain an advantage as story characters. What, you think your favorite storybook characters were just BORN knowing how stories work, how to fight with swords or cast spells or poison an apple? They had to learn all that somewhere, right? Well, that's the premise anyway.
Unfortunately the story here is set in the past, you know, when the fairy tales happened, but the main characters have modern sensibilities, which means they're whiny Gen Z teens who complain a lot, as in ALL THE TIME. Between the two main characters, Sophie and Agatha, Sophie wished very hard to be taken away to this school, and she GOT her wish, only now she's complaining about being put in the "EVIL" section, and she really believes she belongs on the side of GOOD. Meanwhile, Agatha, the more earthy, sensible one, who doesn't like to wear dresses, if you know what I mean, gets placed in the GOOD section, and then she complains too - not because she feels she belongs in the other school, but because she didn't want to go to the school in the first place, she just wants to go home. Ugh, you kids today, you're all so entitled and annoying, you just got a free scholarship, can't you even enjoy that for one damn second?
And the arguments keep going around and around - "But I want to be GOOD!" "But I want to go home!" "But I was put in the wrong SCHOOL!" "But I don't want to wear a DRESS, I want to wear PANTS!" God damn it, shut up already! Girls wear dresses and act charming, boys wear pants and fight with swords, and if you don't like that, you should have been born in a different century, all right? Look, I don't like the gender norms either, I'm all for women wearing whatever they want and working at any career they want, and go ahead, earn more money than men, you deserve it. You don't even need my permission to go out and achieve, just do it, I'll be the one slacking off and watching movies, I'm more than happy to get out of your way. But that's not the way fairy tales work, apparently, not even the modern ones.
Sophie will be allowed to change schools IF, and only IF, she can get a date for the big dance and somehow land a kiss. WOW, that's not too backwards, is it? Really? We're going to judge the girls on how attractive they are to the BOYS, is that really what it's all about? Considering who directed this, I really expected something a bit more modern here. Like, who made the rule that "True love's kiss" has to come from a BOY, why can't it come from a GIRL? I kept thinking that this is where the movie needed to go, to be a modern, hip version of a fairy tale, the kind that young girls need to see these days, or else they're just going to live out the previous generation's mistakes again, with some women needing to be validated by men, instead of finding happiness from within, or with a female partner. Why can't Agatha and Sophie be enough for each other? Hey, they're already outcasts back in Gavaldon, so who really gives a crap what anyone thinks, if they're witches or lesbian witches or just a little more than friends?
And OK, the movie ALMOST gets there. Maybe they didn't want to alienate the conservative parts of this country, because books are being pulled off of school library shelves for a lot less than this. Anyway, it's IMPLIED here that the friendship between these two teen girls is stronger than anything either one has going on with any male student, so make of that what you will. So one's in the good school and the other's in the bad school, who really cares? Do they HAVE to be enemies, then, or nemesises, or whatever? Why can't they be frenemies who also dig each other, deep down, why isn't that an option?
It's apparently got something to do with the way the school was founded, by twin brothers, and yep, you guessed it, one of them was good and the other one was evil. But apparently, even though they were diametrically opposed, they were still able to work together to found the School, and cash in on that sweet, sweet tuition money. Yeah, I see the genius in that plan, because the fairy tale characters probably had a lot of gold and jewels and stuff like that. But then they probably discovered that running a school is not only difficult, but very expensive, like then they had to hire teachers and cover their health insurance, then there's building not just ONE castle but TWO, whose brilliant idea was THAT, it's twice the cost, then you have to build a connecting bridge between them, two gymnasiums, two auditoriums, file a bunch of paperwork. Ugh, it's exhausting, even in the fantasy realm.
There's also something of a paradox here, or perhaps it's more of a question about the whole good and evil thing, are some people inherently "good" and others "evil" or is that all somewhat subjective. Sophie felt she belonged on the "good" side, but was place in the "evil" house. Did somebody know something about her that she didn't know about herself? Or did placing her in the "evil" house make her evil, or at least more evil than she was before? Why are we only dealing in absolutes, anyway, couldn't there be some people who have the capacity for both good and evil? Or either, or neither? When one class is called the "Evers" and the other is the "Nevers" aren't we just setting some students up for failure, or completely lowering the expectations for half of the students to the point where then they no longer have any self-confidence, or willingness to TRY? If one of those Hogwarts houses was called "LOSERVILLE" what would that do to those students, they'd probably just get worse grades because they wouldn't feel any compulsion to better themselves, they're already marked as losers, so why bother?
To be fair, the movie does kind of get into this, a little bit, but not enough. There's a point at which the Good students attack the Evil students, but attacking is not something that good students do, so by their own actions, they've now become the evil ones, forcing the evil students to defend themselves, which is something expected of the Goods. So they've essentially switched places, and through all the madness perhaps they all learn that within every character there is a dual nature, every person has the potential capacity for both attributes, and I could probably have told you from the start that this was not only the case, but where this film was likely to end up. It just kind of gets there in the stupidest way possible.
Maybe there was some potential here to make some kind of larger point, but the message is so muddled (or muggled) with weird spells, glowing fingers and teen seductive techniques, that it's a wonder that we all made it through such a convoluted, rambling pre-fairy tale story. I feel like it was a giant waste of two and a half hours of my time.
Also starring Sophia Anne Caruso (last seen in "David Bowie: The Last Five Years"), Sofia Wylie, Kit Young, Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "Everything Everywhere All at Once"), Jamie Flatters (last heard in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Rob Delaney (last seen in "The Bubble"), Mark Heap (last seen in "About a Boy"), Patti LuPone (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Rachel Bloom (last heard in "Trolls World Tour"), Kerry Washington (last seen in "The Prom"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "2 Days in the Valley"), Ella Hehir, Mahli Perry, Abigail Stones, Earl Cave, Freya Theodora Parks (last seen in "Jane Eyre" (2011), Demi Isaac Oviawe, Kaitlyn Akinpelumi (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), Holly Sturton, Briony Scarlett, Rosie Graham, Emma Lau, Chinenye Ezeudu, Mark Charles, Harvey Scrimshaw (last seen in "The Witch"), Ali Khan (last seen in "6 Underground"), Stephanie Siadatan, Joelle (last seen in "Dune" (2021)), Ally Cubb, Petra Hajduk, Myles Kamwendo, Olivia Booth-Ford, Oliver Watson, Misia Butler, Malik Ibheis, John Macdonald, George Coppen, Steven Calvert, Shanti Deen-Ellis and the voice of Cate Blanchett (last seen in "Nightmare Alley").
RATING: 3 out of 10 pansies with teeth
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