Can the major studios still make magic? From the looks of Oz the Great and Powerful, a dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals, the answer seems to be no — unless, perhaps, the man behind the curtain is Martin Scorsese or James Cameron. The Walt Disney Company is the studio lurking behind Oz and, as usual, it is banking that it can leverage this 3D prehistory of the Wizard of Oz (James Franco) for its wonderful world of cross-promotional marketing and ancillary revenue streams. With so much riding on this Oz, it’s a surprise that the results are so uninspired.

The bigger bummer, though, is that the studio that has enchanted generations with Tinker Bell and at least a few plucky princesses has backed a movie that has such backward ideas about female characters that it makes the 1939 Wizard of Oz look like a suffragist classic. L Frank Baum, who wrote the 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 13 follow-ups, was the son-in-law of the pioneering feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and her influence permeates the Oz books, which take flight with a brave girl who saves her friends and their land. Baum’s second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, even features a parodic take on the suffrage movement, with a female general, Jinjur, leading an all-girl army equipped with knitting needles.

“Friends, fellow-citizens and girls,” Jinjur declares, “we are about to begin our great Revolt against the men of Oz!” Too bad they didn’t storm Disney next.

If they had, maybe they could have jabbed some sense into the director Sam Raimi, best known for the first Spider-Man movies and then used those needles to shred Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire’s script. A little sisterly outrage would have been appropriate because, among other offences, the filmmakers have thrown over Dorothy — one of the greatest heroines in children’s literature and Hollywood cinema — for a prequel about a two-bit magician and Lothario with female troubles. In Baum’s first book and in the 1939 film, the witches are powerful forces for good and wickedness in the Land of Oz. In Oz the Great and Powerful, a witch not only falls for the man Oz, she also turns green from envy when he cosies up to a pretty blonde. (Yeah, the baddie is a brunette.)

It starts better than it ends, partly because Raimi opens by paying tribute to the 1939 film — with black-and-white visuals and a square screen — when he introduces the young wizard, Oscar Diggs, or Oz. Fast talking and promisingly shady, Oz works in a dusty Kansas circus, hustling rubes with doves and peddling sweet nothings to the ladies. One miss, Annie (Michelle Williams), stands out, but he can’t commit. When another woman’s lover chases him, Oz hops in a hot-air balloon and, after riding out a storm, arrives in a garishly hued, digitally rendered land that brings to mind the (bad) cover of a rock album and announces that, while we aren’t in Kansas anymore, neither are we in movie dreamland.

There is a little romance, some adventure, too much jokey patter, a rainbow coalition of Munchkins and enough digital wizardry effectively to make this an animated movie. Even the troika of witches — Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Glinda (Williams) — look as if they have received some unnecessary digital facial smoothing. Franco looks pretty pained in most of his scenes with them, and it’s hard to blame him. Whether embarrassed by the material or just uneasy performing in such a computer-generated atmosphere, he never finds a way to make the wizard pop.

The studios sometimes still gamble on fantasies that sweep audiences up and away, though often the biggest-budgeted releases are war movies in superhero drag or cartoons about characters whose adventures, much like that of Oz in this telling, track like therapeutic journeys (follow your dream of self-actualisation) instead of transcendent excursions. Loaded with special effects, big bangs and generic narrative beats, these movies nonetheless sometimes take you where you’ve never been before.

Mostly, though, like Oz the Great and Powerful, these fantasies drag you back to the same dreary, heavily trod destination, to the same exhausted formulas, gender stereotypes, general idiocy and a mindset that values special effects over storytelling. Yes, companies make movies for shareholders; they have for decades. But who is the audience for the numbly mistitled Oz the Great and Powerful?

OZ the great and powerful 3D (u/a)
Director: Sam Raimi
Cast: James Franco, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams, Mila Kunis, Zach Braff
Running time: 130 minutes