And here’s the team of evil, led by team captain and all-around naughty Evil Sorceress! Little known fact, this team captain is a sister to the Good Guys team captain – but they don’t speak any longer!
Tin Man (2007), technically a TV mini-series, is a retelling of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but darker than the classic movie, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Dorothy is now DG, her parents are, well, the audience will find out, the Tin Man is a cop, the Scarecrow is called Glitch because half of his brain was appropriated by the evil Sorceress, and the Lion is now a mystical empath who spends most of his time looking, ah, mystical. Don’t confuse him with the Mystic Man, the old Wizard driven to madness. And what drove the Sorceress Queen to be evil?
Parts of this are promising, simply as another take on an old, beloved tale, because such explorations can turn up new moral questions not revealed by the first movie; the explorations can be instructive.
But, by and large, Tin Man fails on this most important of matters. It’s too caught up in the tattoos on the buxom of the Evil Sorceress – give them another shake to keep the straight male segment of the audience! – and DG is really quite terrible.
Some of that is the storytellers’ fault. Characters travel through the plot as if aware of their destiny to win; hardly any reverses are met and conquered, moral questions raised and answered. This is a movie too wetly in love with its plot machinations to recognize the importance of sacrifice.
If you delight in visuals, you may want to see this simply as a refreshing change from The Wizard of Oz. But it’s reminiscent of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), a visually rich, dramatically empty set-piece.
If you need your stories to have meat on their bones, be aware this retelling is problematic.
