chelseagirl

So every review I'd read about this movie said it was disappointing.

I'm not sure what they were expecting. It was just what it needed to be.

Spoilers behind the cut.

The thing that I found so disappointing in the original The Craft was that of course power corrupted. Nancy went completely off the rails, the girls turned on each other, and of course our heroine had to stop them. Same old same old story as always in the end.

This movie felt like a corrective to that. The girls stick together. When they overreach and something goes wrong, Lily's coven-mates bind their power. But the problem is really the patriarchy, in the person of David Duchovny's Adam. And in the end, they realize that. They embrace Lily. They join together and defeat Adam.

I actually burst into tears when Helen (Lily's adoptive mother) took Lily to see Nancy, who is her birth mother, at the end. Because in villainizing Nancy, the original movie negated a lot of what was so appealing about it in the first place.

The Craft: Legacy felt like fix-it fanfic. Yes, it was "woke." Well, good for it. In comparing it unfavorably to the original, critics are suggesting that it's better dramatically to take an empowerment narrative for four teenage outcasts, and have them turn on each other? Not be able to handle the power? Because that's not predictable at all. Oh, wait.

And the critics hated this new one. This is why we can't have nice things.

The original movie is awesome until a certain point. And then it becomes not-so-awesome. It becomes obvious. The heroine needs a male ally to take down her sister-witches, because women can't control themselves.

But what if that wasn't the story we told each other again and again? In Legacy, women didn't turn on each other. They supported each other and they prevailed.

And maybe there's even hope for Nancy.