Retrospective: Return to Oz (Patreon)

With Return to Oz, master-editor Walter Murch had the biggest responsibility of his career, with the sword of Damocles suspended directly above his head. He was a first-time director tasked with shooting a sequel to the most beloved film of all time, while Disney breathed down his neck and fired him at least once. The result was a financial disaster that traumatized a generation of children. Having edited Coppola's masterpieces and restored Welles' Touch of Evil to its original vision wasn't going to redeem Walter Murch in Hollywood's eyes. Scaring the money away is the cardinal sin of Hollywood. Murch never directed another film.

This, of course, is part of what makes Return to Oz so fascinating. Despite its title, it's not a sequel to MGM's The Wizard of Oz in the strictest sense. While Return to Oz implements properties of the 1939 movie such as the ruby slippers or people in Oz mirroring those in Kansas, these don't make it a sequel so much as an homage. Its source material is primarily L. Frank Baum's Oz books — events and details from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that were excluded from the 1939 film are referenced in Return to Oz. The Murch film is more or less an adaptation of Ozma of Oz, with some elements lifted from The Marvelous Land of Oz (although sadly, that book's trans elements is completely ignored). Return to Oz retains Baum's panpsychism and surrealist imagery, if not his impeccably offbeat dialogue. Its closest analogue in the 21st Century is probably the work of Mike Flanagan — broadly an adaptation of its source material, but responding to every adaptation that precedes itself.

Like Flanagan's films, Return to Oz is chock-full of psychological torment. Baum's books never went quite as dark as to have Auntie Em send Dorothy to electroshock therapy for her supposed delusions about Oz, nor did it show a ruined and derelict Emerald City festooned with the turned-into-stone remains of the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion (and man, using the John Neill designs of the characters must have thrown off audiences in 1985). It's like an Oz rendition of Prince Caspian, where the Pevensies return to Narnia and find all their friends are dead and the kingdom they once ruled has been destroyed in a genocide.

If this were miserable to watch, Return to Oz would feel more like a 2010s grimdark reboot of Oz. But instead it feels like a bold reimagining, a lovely dark fantasy akin to its contemporary The Dark Crystal, with such delightful characters as Billina, Tik-Tok, and Jack Pumpkinhead. Getting advertised as a sequel to The Wizard of Oz certainly didn't help this movie, but it's a brave and well-crafted revisionist take on the source material. Murch proves himself a capable director, shooting with the restraint of an editor (the movie feels like it was shot with specific cuts in mind). It's an uneven movie — the second half of the movie, despite the wonderful presence of Nicol Williamson and the Nome King's game, crawls a bit, and the score is weak at best. But if this movie had been released a decade later, it would have been hailed as a classic. An unjustly buried minor gem of its time.