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sophiakmonsen
Reviews
The School for Good and Evil (2022)
Why this was disappointing - a readers perspective
Firstly, let's start with what went well in the movie. I thought that the set design was lovely - not what I had imagined, for the Good school, but you can't have it all - and the costume design was rather good.
I should mention that I know this book like the back of my hand. It has been read so many times it's basically in shreds - literally, not figuratively. This alone should give me enough credit to properly break down why this was upsetting to watch.
Now let's get onto the problems:
1) Agatha's actor was far too pretty. In the books, Agatha is described as 'homely' and all in all, plain and ugly. She is meant to be unkept and almost confident in how she presents herself, which cements her beginning mindset: "Who cares how I look when they all think I'm a witch anyway?"
The casting director didn't have to cast a different actor necessarily, but the fact that she was incredibly clean and had fitting clothes lost her entire message. Oh, so the townspeople think you're a witch? Why? You don't act or look like one, you just live in a graveyard. The lack of a baseline for her confidence, which was incredibly low, made it so that she didn't have anywhere to grow as a character.
2) Awareness about the school for good and evil. The fact that they didn't know about the school meant that Agatha, again, didn't have the character growth from a 'non-believer' (going against the town) who secretly read books, and Sophie didn't have the motivation to become Agatha's friend, which leads me to my next point...
3) Sophie and Agatha are childhood friends. This completely diminishes Sophie's potential for evil. In the books, Sophie's only reason for befriending Agatha was for 'Good points', in which she was doing a 'good deed' by becoming friends with the witch at the top of the graveyard. For a reader, this meant that if you ignored all the signs pointing her towards the school for good, it became obvious she was destined for evil.
4) The School Master. His involvement, again, diminished Sophie's evil actions - which she originally made completely independently - by way of him influencing her. He was actually not all that present in the first book, and if he was, he was very old, and we as the reader were unsure whether he was good or evil. Why have a fight scene with an unknown victor if it is going to be revealed instantly?
5) Blood magic. To my knowledge, blood magic has never been referenced in the book. For a movie already overpacked with brushed-over information, why add this? It is not true to the book, and implies that Sophie's extremely strong magic is something that can be learnt by anyone.
6) Professor Sader. His lack of involvement just confused me, mainly about the sequel.
7) Agatha's make-over scene. Due to a lack of her actually being ugly and shunned by her peers, this vastly important scene, which influenced the rest of the book heavily, was barely memorable. What was once Agatha finding confidence in herself, without the need of an actual make-over due to Dovey's wand breaking at the request, meant nothing. It also meant it was for no reason that Sophie began to embrace evil, which I'm sure to first time enjoyers of the SGE, seemed random and pointless.
8) The small things. For example, Anadil and Tedros' casting. Why would they make a starved-looking albino villain larger than Dot was meant to be, and certainly... darker? They had one job. Also, it was just a small thing that irked me, but I think that if you can't get the basic details of a character correct, then it most likely means the people who worked on the film didn't care about the source material.
9) The lack of a proper fight was irritating. This amazing battle between quickly-changing good and evil students, drowned by Sophie and getting thrown out of a hall was something I could literally only imagine, and now it will never be realised.
The reason I love this book, and book series is because of the ever growing, ever changing characters, and the complex plot that means I can read it nearly ten years from when I first bought it a remember a plot point that I had forgotten (which I rarely do with books). With a plot this complicated, it would have benefitted vastly from a series, not a simultaneously drawn out but rushed film. I would have been content if half of the first book had been made into one series.
While I once admired Soman Chainani's creativity, I think it goes too far when he says that his adaptation was less of an adaptation and more of a retelling. No. You wrote the book fans love, fans don't want to see an arguably worse retelling, and frankly, that's lazy.
The directing was average, the editing was rather bad, and the rest of the movie was just 'meh'. The plot dragged this average movie back down into the dirt.
Of course, I recognise that the SGE cannot be directly adapted, but it would have been nice to see some evidence that an effort was made.
Not looking forward to the sequel.