“And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others.”

I know it’s probably hard to take me seriously given the rating I’ve given this movie, but hear me out. Whenever I rate and review movies, I never try to be anything less than honest. This is most definitely not a bad movie, just not one that, because of the movies I’m accustomed to, I gravitate towards really much at all. I still have plenty of positive things to say about The Wizard of Oz, it’s just not a movie for me, and maybe that’s just because I need to see more old films, who knows.

I’ll start off with what still really holds up. The thing that impressed me the most about this movie is that, despite being made in the 1930s, the sets and the world are still so believable. Every set piece is gorgeous to look at and has stood the test of time amazingly well. Sure, some parts just look a little like a stage, but that doesn’t ever take away from their appeal. It almost makes them more mesmerizing and adds to the movie’s charm. I loved every place they visited, and honestly, would be really interested in looking more into how the filmmakers achieved the sets themselves.

Kind of adding onto that are the practical effects and the occasional special effects. They are yet another thing that absolutely stands the test of time, and that’s because, well, they were done for real and not on a computer limited by the technology of whatever time period. While not everything is completely believable in today’s world, everything at the very least works. Even the most outdated effects in the film don’t take away from anything at all, because you know just how revolutionary they were for the time.

Probably my second favorite thing about The Wizard of Oz, behind the sets, was the music. There was absolutely no technology at the time to replace or enhance any of the singing that was done, so all of the actors were doing it one hundred percent for real. I liked pretty much all of the songs, because they all had this charm to them that can really only come from this time period that the movie was made in. If these songs were done in a movie today, it just wouldn’t work at all. Judy Garland also has an incredible voice.

The last thing I want to talk about before moving on to the next part of my review is something that doesn’t correlate to the original release of the movie, but it’s something I really wanted to talk about. What I’m referring to is the added color to the film that was done decades after its release. Adding color to The Wizard of Oz was such a bold but completely necessary thing to edit into the movie, and I honestly can’t imagine what it would be like without it. I couldn’t imagine seeing the whole world of this movie in just plain black and white, and the people who added the color didn’t just half-bake this project either. It’s one of those feats that is so hard to grasp. I mean, literally every single frame they colored had to be done perfectly, and not only that, but it had to remain consistent throughout the runtime, and what’s crazy is that they fully accomplished this task. If you haven’t already, I would highly recommend watching videos on the behind-the-scenes of this project.

Okay, now onto the more controversial stuff. One of the big reasons why I rate this movie in the middle is because of the pacing. I’m so used to the pacing of movies that has been used really since the 1970s, so older movies like this, I always have a hard time fully getting into. What I mean by this is that there really isn’t much plot momentum or sense of direction that you see in a lot of today’s movies. Sure, you know the task at hand and what they need to do to get there, but the whole film feels like a series of random events and encounters that didn’t intrigue me all that much.

The other thing I wasn’t a crazy huge fan of was the lack of any meaningful character development. There is technically some, but it’s not the typical “character journey” type stuff that I’m so used to. It’s more of an “I want this” from the characters, and then the film never really comes back to it in a big way until the very end. I also wasn’t really a fan of any of the characters besides Dorothy and her dog, which is a shame because you can tell that the film really tries to get you to care about all of them by making each one of them such pitiful and miserable characters.

The film also comes to a pretty anticlimactic finish with the climax. They don’t build up the Wicked Witch to be all that intimidating or scary in my opinion, and how they deal with her by the end was rather underwhelming and incredibly random. I know it’s a story from over a century ago, but that doesn’t really change anything for me.

I know I’ll probably lose a lot of credit from this review because of how much it’s regarded as a classic, but this was just my personal experience with the film, rewatching it both years later from the last time I saw it, and over three-fourths of a century after its release.