Oz the Great and Powerful

Sam Raimi's 2013 prequel arrives as a curious artifact of Hollywood's relationship with its own feminist legacy, a film that manages to take one of cinema's most progressive works and systematically drain it of any progressive sensibility. Where the 1939 original offered Dorothy as a resourceful young woman who solved her own problems, this film subordinates its female characters to a male protagonist's journey, rendering them either objects of desire or obstacles to overcome. The three witches, particularly Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz, embody a tired dynamic in which female power is inherently suspect, their ambitions read as wickedness and their agency as manipulation. One might charitably note that this was 2013, not 2023, yet the film still managed to be retrograde even by the standards of its own moment.

The film's casting offers surface-level diversity through its ensemble, yet the narrative structure itself functions as a corrective to any notion that women might deserve central agency in their own story. The female characters exist primarily to validate or challenge the male lead's arc, their motivations consistently subordinated to his education in humility and authenticity. There is no meaningful engagement with identity politics, no consideration of the institutional systems that might oppress these characters, no examination of anything beyond the romantic and political machinations of the witch trio. The film is, in essence, a perfectly conventional piece of mainstream entertainment that happened to arrive in a cultural moment when such conventionality was increasingly difficult to defend.

Where the film does operate is in its unexamined assumption that maleness equals universality and that a male protagonist's perspective requires no justification or interrogation. This is not progressive cinema, nor was it particularly progressive for 2013. It is the sound of Hollywood choosing not to hear the conversations happening around it, a choice that registers not as boldness but as a kind of determined indifference.