The School For Good and Evil: A Shallow Look At Morality

Netflix’s latest original film The School for Good and Evil is a perfect example of a movie that has a lot going for it but the script just fails in execution. There is very little that is inherently wrong with the film, to the point where the plot doesn’t kick in until about 40 minutes in but the characters are still compelling enough to make the viewer want to watch beyond that, however the movie certainly could have been better.

The movie follows Sophie (Sophia Ann Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie) as they are carried off to the titular School for Good and Evil that trains the next generation of fairy tale heroes and villains. Agatha doesn’t want to go at all and Sophie wants to go to learn how to be a princess, however Agatha gets dropped off at the School for Good and Sophie ends up at the School for Evil. The two are convinced it was a mistake and are told by the headmaster (Lawrence Fishburne) that if they can prove it is a mistake, they will be put into the proper schools.

The movie does not have many major issues on the technical side. The acting is all great considering the caliber of talent filling out the auxiliary cast (Michelle Yeoh, Kerry Washington, and Charlize Theron are some of the stars also in the movie in smaller roles) and the movie is edited fine. The only real technical issue comes from misuse of the effects budget. There are some cool ideas that are never fully fleshed out, probably because of a comparatively low budget for visuals in a visual effect heavy movie, but effects are used needlessly in other places. The biggest offender of this is that there are multiple segments in a forest where the heroes will have to face off against every caliber of monster they could ever encounter, but they only ever show pansies that have teeth and a scarecrow that comes to life. On the other end of the spectrum, there are multiple wolf-men guards that are never really necessary to the story but are an expensive effect that does not help the plot.

The place where the movie falls apart is the plot and specifically how it interacts with the wider thematic points it introduces. The villain’s motivations are never really explained and what he does kind of comes out of left field to give a conflict at the end and his plan, namely diluting what “good” means to make it easier for evil to win, is interesting but poorly executed. The additional abilities endowed at about the halfway point are also interesting but are never really explained and just kind of muddy the waters about what each side can do. At nearly two and a half hours, it’s not like the movie has a shortage of time to work with, it’s just poorly allocated.

The bigger structural issues with the narrative are not something that could have been fixed with additional scenes, they would have had to be addressed during the script stage relatively early on in development. The ideas are interesting, and it is a good jumping on point for a discussion about morality, however it does not go as deeply as a story like this should have gone where the conflict is centered on this moral issue. That said, the movie is fairly entertaining, and it is not the worst thing Netflix has put out and it could provide an amount of entertainment for someone who wants to watch something new. There could be a sequel and, conceptually, there is nothing about the narrative that would make it not work.

Final Rating: 6.5/10