The fear when I heard that Disney was making Oz the Great and Powerful was that they’d do to L. Frank Baum’s land of Oz what they (and Tim Burton) did to Alice's Wonderland a few years back: amp up the weirdness to make the story nothing but a jumble of tediously self-satisfied eccentricities. Director Sam Raimi’s prequel to the familiar story of The Wizard of Oz avoids such a fate by not overly indulging in the visual wonders of the fantasy world at the expense of its characters. With a satisfying backstory of how the Wizard (James Franco) first came to Oz and by taking pains to honor and imitate its predecessor, Oz the Great and Powerful should please fans of the beloved 1939 film (even though it’s not a musical).

Consider the sort of situation Yuval Diskin faced as head of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet. You have a chance to take out a known terrorist. The bad guy is in a vehicle with two other people, but you’re uncertain whether they’re innocent or also involved in terrorist activities. The prime minister wants to know: should he launch an attack or not? The pressure in this scenario is biased towards action over inaction. “’Don’t do it’ seems easier, but it’s often harder,” Diskin says early on in the riveting, Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers. So much of the long-running mess that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be understood from that statement. When either side is in doubt, the default position has become “attack.”

A  subject like this one deserves a better film. But since Emperor is all we’ve got, let’s make the most of it. Let’s set aside the question of how accurate Emperor is as a history of the first few weeks of the United States’ occupation of Japan at the end of World War II. Let’s grant that much of what’s depicted is made-up entirely, some of it even an utter distortion of Hirohito’s role in his country’s militaristic expansionism.