Maleficent. When I first saw the previews to the new movie starring Angelina Jolie, my first impressions were: Angelina Jolie was made for that role, the special effects looked amazing and I was really sad that I had to wait two months until it was released to see it. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m happy to say it met all of my expectations and then exceeded them, in the most magical ways possible.
Like any good story, this one tells of Maleficent, a powerful fairy who is complex, surprising and utterly captivating. This ‘villain’ is a far cry from the one-sided character most of us know from the animated Disney movie Sleeping Beauty (1959). As a mother of two small children, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched the animated Disney movie (and I confess to humming the “Once Upon A Dream” song while I’ve made dinner on several occasions. Hey, it’s a catchy tune!). The Maleficent in the animated movie appears to be a true villain, without room for redemption, no sign of good. As a writer, I know well that there’s always at least two sides to every story and the characters who are cast as the villain or the hero is entirely dependent on whose perspective the story is being told by. To quote a line from that song that likes to get stuck in my head, “…visions are seldom what they seem…”
While my sequel, Prism, features the character Adante on the cover, it is her mentor, the Queen of the Venvian, who is the main antagonist at odds with the heroes of the novel. Atargatis is her name and she is powerful, cunning and lethal. When I was first creating her for Book One of the series, Luminous, I tried to imagine strong female villains and Maleficent was at the top of the list. She influenced my Atargatis greatly but to make Atargatis a fully realized character, I had to delve into her beginnings, which all villains have. Somewhere along the line, everyone has to make a choice between going down the path of good or taking the path of evil, and I think that’s part of what makes villains so intriguing – the point when they decided to choose evil. The more complex a villain is, the more believable and engaging they are to readers. I fleshed out Atargatis’s history and even wrote a short story about the pivotal moment in her life that altered her future forever (I hope to release it on my website before the end of the year).
To get back to the movie, Maleficent, I was very pleased to see Maleficent’s character presented in all the complexity, mystery and magic due such an iconic villain. So while I don’t routinely review movies on my blog, the fantasy lover in me thoroughly enjoyed Maleficent and you should definitely run out and see it as well. You’d get there faster if you had a pair of giant black bird wings!
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