Saw this movie a few days ago and thought it sucked. Poorly written and poorly presented. It COULD have been good, but it wasn't. The problems:
1) Maleficent's motivations weren't developed clearly enough. The writers needed to come up with a compelling reason as to why she'd make such a seemingly arbitrary curse as "She'll prick her finger and fall asleep before she's 16, and only true love will wake her! Mwa ha ha!", and while I don't think they necessarily failed there they totally failed to sell it to the audience. Even if the reasons are dumb (and they are here) a competent director/screenwriter could present them in such a way that the audience suspends disbelief and doesn't question the dumbness, but that wasn't the case here. I get that the opening narration was going for a fairy tale style where massive pills like "He told her it was true love's kiss, but it wasn't." can be shoved down our throats without much question (just like how no one questioned
why Maleficent was evil in
Sleeping Beauty - she just was) but when those pills are integral to the plot that stylistic choice doesn't really work. So when she finally comes round to hamming it up with the big curse it feels totally off. Taking control of her "kingdom" also made no sense. If it was a "Well, if
he wants a kingdom so bad then
I want one too!" it wasn't established at all.
2) The king and queen are fucking IDIOTS. Stefan drugs and mutilates arguably the most important person in a realm he's been at war with for years, watches her become a tyrant and turn the land into a fortress, and when three of her subjects come to the castle to supposedly wish his child well for the future he barely - if at all - questions their loyalty/motivations, lets them cast spells on the kid, and then entrusts them with her care! That's like cutting off Saddam's balls, and when three Iraqis come knocking at your door you greet them with milk, cookies and your first born son.
3) The second act interrupts the narrative, makes no sense, and drags on. This is where the movie takes a break from Maleficent's revenge and focuses on her realising her mistakes, and it's pretty much faffing about for half an hour with no direction at all. It's just bad writing again - they wanted to be like
Frozen and subvert the "true love" trope, they wanted to make Maleficent more sympathetic by having her find love, but they didn't really know how to do it. There's no reason why she would curse the child only to immediately become her silent guardian. There needed to at least be a scene where she's happy with her revenge, and then make that change once she realises she's hurt/hurting an innocent child in the process. It's like they attempted to write something like this in by having the good fairies being incompetent custodians (particularly the cliff scene) but Maleficent never has that realisation. It's not like "Haha, those idiots are going to kill that baby for me! ... oh shit, they're actually going to kill that baby. D:" it's just "Oh deary me, look at those incompetent fools. *sigh* I guess I'll just have to step in then, by golly! Ho ho ho!" If her only plan was to get revenge then why would she bother looking after the child? Just to make the revenge all the sweeter by marinating it for 16 years?
4) Maleficent's powers are wildly inconsistent (or she's unbelievably stupid). She can create a wall of thorns surrounding her kingdom, can turn a crow into a man and back again effortlessly, but she can't magic herself a new set of wings? She has seemingly limitless power but never even
attempts to reclaim her wings (maybe she thought they were lost forever but she didn't seem surprised when they magically reattached, so...)? Though iron burns her skin it doesn't seem to limit her powers, so why couldn't she turn the soldiers into mice or something? With the amount of power she was shown to possess I never felt for a second that she was ever in any danger, which made all the action scenes in act 3 boring.
5) By far the biggest insult in this movie: we're introduced to the Moors as a communistic utopia. There's no king, there's no classes, everyone is equal and order is maintained through cooperation and respect. Maleficent upsets this balance by instating herself as leader - a move that clearly upsets the rest of the population there, though they're too scared to rebel against her. You would think that after her redemption where she pulls down the thorns and steps down from her throne that the tyranny would be over and the Moors would return to their communistic paradise, right? Fucking NOPE! Aurora is your NEW Queen, you filthy peasants!
Oh, and the CGI sucked ass too.