The final trailer for Maleficent has been released. As can be said of all of the footage revealed in the trailers, it looks beautiful; the film is gorgeously shot. In a previous featurette for the movie its star Angelina Jolie suggested that Maleficent will offer viewers a world they’ve never seen before, and the trailers, at least, have delivered on this.
This trailer introduces Maleficent by linking her story to the Disney classic Sleeping Beauty, but as Maleficent screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast, Alice in Wonderland) has promised, the new movie is a “reinvention, not just a re-telling of the same story.” This is Maleficent’s story — not Princess Aurora’s. We will discover “what could make a good fairy go bad.” We see Maleficent transform what appears to be one of her henchman into a bird, Princess Aurora (played by the delightful Elle Fanning) cautiously approaching the infamous spindle, and lots of intense action scenes featuring soldiers and sinister looking trees (not of the Evil Dead variety).
At the London premiere of the film, Jolie used the opportunity to speak about the 286 Nigerian school girls who have been kidnapped. “The important thing though is to understand that this happens because these men think they can get away with this and they can do this,” Jolie explained. In a recent interview with ET Online, Jolie emphasized the importance of “looking at the bigger picture and understanding this epidemic of men thinking that women don’t have the right to an education and that they feel they can get away with this kind of behavior, and that it’s fine to just take a woman and sell a woman or abuse a woman or rape a woman.”
It’s excellent — though unsurprising, given her passion for human rights advocacy — that Jolie is pointing out some of the wider systemic issues at play in this situation. Jolie often uses the intense spotlight put on her to shine light on issues affecting women, including sharing details about her recent double mastectomy. It’s likely that Jolie will continue to speak about these topics throughout Maleficent’s press tour. The film opens on May 30 in the U.S..
