Critical Analysis of Maleficent

Maleficent(2014) directed by Robert Stromberg and written by Linda Woolverton is a spectacular and exciting dark fantasy movie. A vengeful fairy is driven to curse an infant princess, only to discover that the child may be the one person who can restore peace to their troubled land. Angelina Jolie delivers an amazing performance and makes a fantastic Disney villain.  Angelina's performance in the film has been repeatedly singled out for praise by critics. Linda Woolverton's screenplay went through at least 15 versions as the film progressed in the production. 

Genre
Maleficent is a action, adventure, fantasy and romance movie, having combined genres makes this film a hybrid genre. This makes the film appeal to a wider range of people while making it more entertaining and unpredictable as so many genres are mixed together. Using these specific genres work well as they all have completely different audience groups such as action is aimed for men, romance is aimed for women and fantasy is usually aimed at a wide range depending on the storyline.


The typical codes and conventions of an action, adventure film
The characters in action, adventure genre tend to be believable even though the film itself can be unrealistic also the main character is usually the hero with a power or talent. Almost always there will be a team of innocent characters who get caught up in the action and end up having to help the hero. Lastly some humorous dialogue would be used to diffuse situations.
The typical codes and conventions of a fantasy film
Fantasy is used to describe the specific genre that uses magic and other supernatural elements. Theses films tend to revolve around mystical creatures such as vampires, werewolves and fairies. The trailers are very secretive and careful so they don't give away the storyline. There are always dramatic and uneasy music throughout this film genre.
The audience expectations 
From a action, adventure film the audience would expect a lot of fast pace editing with fighting scenes also a bad guy most of the time and very tense scenes when the audience doesn't know what's going to happen. The continuous themes the audience would expect are: weapons, smoking, violence, powers, music and stunts. The expectations of a fantasy would be monsters or powerful creatures, a lot of fighting and editing and mostly CGI. The continuous themes would be good vs. Evil, violence, music and fast pace editing.

Content
Mise-en-scene and cinematography
Maleficent is based on a Disney story about sleeping beauty. In this film it has a lot of high contrast lighting which shows harsh shafts of light and dramatic streaks of blackness. It also uses some high key lighting showing brightness and a few shadows. There are a few low angle shots, this angle shows the importance of the character and they are given a sense of power and respect.

Throughout the film there are a lot of long shots which are considered a loose frame and tends to suggest freedom as the shots show space around them.

Most shots are shallow showing only one plane in focus, isolating the characters from what is going on in the rest of the scene.



Also most scenes show full front shots which shows the character facing the camera. This is the position with the most intimacy and the character is looking in our direction to invite us. The scenes are quite alien settings with mystical creatures and all the green screen and CGI can be quite false at times in the movie.