Oz the Great and Powerful is on many levels a very good film. There's a decent sparkle to the dialogue, the performers are all excellent and the visual effects and costumes are simply gorgeous. The plot is straightforward and follows the titular carnival 'wizard' from Kansas to Oz and his first clash with the Wicked witches thereof. There are a few elements drawn directly from the books of L Frank Baum (in particular the China People), but the overall aesthetic and structure echoes the film The Wizard of Oz more than the original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While nothing hugely original, the story primarily charts Oz's journey from superficial coward to honoured leader of Oz, by way of the usual trials of self-discovery and love.
The latter of these brings in the film's major problem. Oz is introduced as a somewhat vain womaniser whose one true love, after years of waiting at home in Kansas for him to achieve greatness, has just decided to accept the proposal of an honest farmer, John Gale (one presumes, therefore, that she is the mother-to-be of Dorothy Gale). Fleeing from an angry rival (not John Gale, but the lover/husband of one of the women he is shown to cynically seduce on a regular basis), he is swept into a tornado and - after a scene of relentless peril reminiscent of segments from director Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies, crash lands in Oz and immediately seduces the beautiful, innocent witch Theodora, essentially because he can. This seduction leads directly to Theodora becoming the Wicked Witch of the West - twice as angry and twice as deadly as her sister, the original Wicked Witch.
Meanwhile, Oz meets Glinda, the Good Witch (as in the movie, there is only one Good Witch), who is the spitting image of his lost love and ultimately his love interest for the movie, and therein is my problem. Ultimately, Oz is reformed and redeemed, and at the end of the film his reward is not merely rule of Oz but the love of the princess (which Glinda is revealed to be). While he owns to his fault in breaking Theodora's heart and recognises his need for friends and family, the fact that he is still able to move on without a pause to the blonde who happens to look like his sweetheart leaves a lesson vitally unlearned in what is essentially a story about learning to be a better man. In life, that might be what happens, but this is a movie and it felt to me like something of a cop out; that the 'right' ending would be the one in which the Wizard simply devotes his life to protecting the evil that he created, without 'reward'.
It is also an ending which fits very oddly with the ending of The Wizard of Oz, in which Oz can hardly wait to return to Kansas and Glinda is hardly bummed out to find him gone.
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