Tom McGee's Blog

The SciFi chan­nel was push­ing this mini-series in a big way a few weeks ago, so I carved out some time to watch it. It’s a rein­ven­tion of “The Won­der­ful Wiz­ard Of Oz,” the rest of L. Frank Baum’s delight­ful series of Oz books. The 1939 movie has sucked most of the oxy­gen out of the room, but there’s a lot more to his imag­i­nary land­scape than just that one trip down the yel­low brick road. They really deserve a lot more read­ings than they get.

But I digress. In this rein­ven­tion, the germ of the plot and basic out­line of char­ac­ters is trans­posed into a sce­nario where “The O.Z.” (Outer Zone) is a par­al­lel realm to where we live, and those in the know can move seam­lessly back-and-forth. At the begin­ning, a bunch of storm trooper-like guys (the “long­coats”) use a cyclone as a diver­sion to come over to our side and snatch young D.G. to bring her back. Some­thing goes a lit­tle wrong and they lose track of her. She’s cap­tured by a bunch of minia­ture mili­ti­a­men (aka Munchkins) with a bad atti­tude but escapes with the help of a fel­low prisoner.

The pris­oner, fill­ing the role of the scare­crow, we find out later is a for­mer advi­sor to the queen. A bril­liant sci­en­tist, he had some infor­ma­tion on weapons tech­nol­ogy that he wouldn’t give up vol­un­tar­ily, so they swiped part of his brain and put a zip­per on top of his head to keep it closed. So, he’s look­ing for a brain.

They meet up with a for­mer cop who’s hard-bitten and cyn­i­cal after watch­ing his fam­ily beaten and pre­sum­ably mur­dered by the long­coats. So, he’s got no heart, get it?

Later on the meet a lion-like guy who can see the future. The bad guys wire him up and tor­ture him to get him to reveal more, so he’s some­what shell­shocked and appears, that’s right, cowardly.

That all works for me. The rest of the story picks up the famil­iar tropes — the yel­low brick road, the wiz­ard, the city — but repur­poses them in a way so that they’re rec­og­niz­able with­out being cute. The wiz­ard is a for­mer magi­cian. The city is like the “Cen­ter City” in Spielberg’s “AI”. In good decon­struc­tivist fash­ion the emer­ald and the city are two dif­fer­ent things. The yel­low brick road is over­grown and thor­oughly obscured. The witch melts, but into a greasy black pool. The apple trees are mag­i­cal but in a dif­fer­ent way. Aun­tie Em, Uncle Henry and Toto are there, too, but they are most def­i­nitely not what they appear to be.

Zooey Deschanel plays D.G. (get it — Dorothy Gale?), a wait­ress in a dead-end cof­fee shop who finds her­self not in Kansas at all. She’s got this great wide-eyed look, but com­bines it with a no-nonsense atti­tude where she’s amazed by every­thing she sees but intim­i­dated by none of it. She really pulls the whole thing together.

The only prob­lem is the end­ing. Once upon a time, it was enough to tell a story where per­sonal dis­cov­ery and the arc of a char­ac­ter pro­vided drama enough. When Oedi­pus found out who he was and what he’d done, that was enough. Sopho­cles didn’t find it nec­es­sary to have an aster­oid head­ing towards Thebes so that even as mes­sen­gers were deliv­er­ing pieces of the puz­zle the hero was rac­ing to save human­ity against Dr. Evil and her “laser beam.” He wisely put the sphinx and the plague in the pro­logue, and let the play be just about the inner drama.

So here, the dis­cov­ery of the rela­tion­ship between D.G. and the witch, and who they both really are, could and should have been enough. But no, that’s not 21^st-century enough. There has to be an evil plan to destroy the world as we know it to be thwarted first.

BO-ring. To put it even more directly, would the 1939 movie have ben­e­fit­ted if an addi­tional 45 min­utes were added on, in which the Wicked Witch of the West gained con­trol of the ruby slip­pers and was on the verge of using their tremen­dous power to blot out the sun and plunge Oz into eter­nal dark­ness using a tremen­dous machine emit­ting a bright green ray into space, but only through the pluck, wis­dom, courage and heart of our intre­pid heroes they were able to stop her?

I don’t think so. So at the risk of a spoiler, you can pretty much shut it down after you find out what hap­pened in the cave.

Still, all in all a pretty good way to waste six hours in front of the TV.