Film Reviews #128: The Lion King (2019)

Imagine with me, if you would, a remake of the most successful and beloved Disney Feature Length Animated Film of all time.  How would you remake it?  Would you load the film with nostalgic callbacks?  Would you compel yourself to hire the same voice actor to reprise a role 25 years after the original time he voiced him?  Would you want to make a statement regarding the film's cast?  Would Hans Zimmer be back to write the score?  Would you do it all over again, with just a slight handful of characters being changed around?  

If you answered yes to just one of these questions, then The Lion King (2019) is the film for you.  

If you answered no and are a reasonably minded human being, then this film might actually be the most insulting Disney Remake to this date for you.  The film attempts nothing out of the box or unique.  If anything, so much of the film is just a sad attempt at even a watered down version of he original motion picture.  It was made with no heart, no charm and lacks basically all of the nuance and scope of the original film from 1994.  In an attempt to make the film as realistic naturally as possible, Jon Favreau and Disney made several key mistakes in attempting to replicate the success of why The Lion King appealed to us so much when we were younger and still does to this day.  And they are all extremely easy to spot.  But, let's go through this film bit by bit.  

Plot: (I'd ordinarily slap the OG 1994 plotlines here, but I'm going to be nice).  In the African Savannah, a young lion cub is born to proud parents in the wise King Mufasa (James Earl Jones) and his wife Queen Sarabi (Alfre Woodard) in the hopes of him succeeding Mufasa as King when he's older.  Simba (JD McCrary as a Cub and Donald Glover as an Adult), does his best to learn from his wise and powerful father, but simply cannot shake the joys and ideas of how he might one day become King of all of the Pride Lands and be able to do things the way he wants them to be done, much to the dismay of the King's Majordomo, a hornbill named Zazu (John Oliver).  

However, Mufasa's brother Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is deeply jealous of his nephew and plots to have the cub murdered by a pack of vicious yet scatterbrained Hyenas.  The plot to have Simba and his friend Nala (Shahadi Wright Joseph as a Cub and Beyonce Knowles-Carter as an Adult) eaten by the hyenas is foiled by Mufasa, prompting Scar to fully align himself with the Hyenas in an attempt to overthrow Mufasa and take his self-proclaimed rightful place as King.  This leads to Simba being cornered in the gorge by a stampede of frightened wildebeests.  Mufasa plunges into the gorge to save his son and succeeds, but when he tried to climb his way out, Scar threw his brother back into the gorge, killing him.  Simba comes across his father's body and is informed by Scar that it was his fault for his father's death, urging the cub to run away from his guilt rather than face up to his mother and the pride for killing Mufasa.  Simba flees and even manages to avoid the Hyenas once more before entering exile.  With Mufasa and Simba both presumed dead, Scar assumes the throne of Pride Rock and announces the Hyenas would be joining him.  

Simba is found unconscious in the desert by a Warthog named Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) and his meerkat companion in Timon (Billy Eichner).  Despite being afraid of the cub initially, Timon and Pumbaa become surrogate siblings to the cub and teach him about their lifestyle known as Hakuna Matata.  Simba comes to find himself at home in the jungles of Timon and Pumbaa and grows into a lackadaisical and carefree grown up lion, but he still has moments of self-reflection and doubt regarding his failure to uphold his father's teachings.  One day, Simba saves Timon and Pumbaa from a hungry lioness and discovers that it is in fact his childhood friend Nala.  Though the two become enamored with one another, Nala informs Simba of the monstrous conditions the Pridelands have endured under Scar's reign and pleads with him to return home.  Simba doubts himself and thus declines, leaving it up to the wise shaman mandrill known as Rafiki (John Kani) to show Simba that his father's spirit lives on inside of him and that he must accept his responsibilities.  

What's Wrong?: I'd like to say that this film doesn't have a "Where do I even begin" type of amount of flaws, but once again, Disney doesn't want to have to put legitimate effort into these remakes, so I once again have to trot out the old line of "Where do I even begin with this film?"  Don't like it?  Tough.  This film stinks to high heaven.  

As with Aladdin (2019), the cast for this film is all over the map.  While some actors manage to provide us with quality voice acting (chiefly Donald Glover), most of the actors in this film don't even seem to be trying for the most part.  This is especially prevalent in James Earl Jones's reprising of Mufasa and Beyonce's role as Nala.  The problem with casting Mufasa as James Earl Jones again is that the presence of his voice in this role is just not fitting.  Color me crazy, but when I first learned they were bringing James Earl Jones back, I thought they would rewrite Mufasa to be an older lion who finally managed to have a son, thus causing his rift between him and Scar.  I guess a man who sounded too silly to be Darth Vader anymore in Rogue One was just perfect to play the King of the Pridelands in the prime of his life.  James Earl Jones's voice simply does not fit the role of a powerful lion anymore.  It's nothing he did, it's just the fact that he's 25 years older now.  It'd be like bringing Billy Joel back to play Dodger in a remake of Oliver and Company.  (This is NOT an endorsement Disney, please do not remake Oliver and Company!)  So much so, that there are actually some instances where James Earl Jones's lines from the original film (used and unused) are repurposed for this film.  It's most prevalent in the Stampede when Mufasa calls out to his son.  It's literally lines he had from the 1994 film.  And the fact that it's packaged around some of 25 years later JEJ's lines shows way too much for this film to be taken seriously.

Beyonce is even worse, and unlike JEJ, she has no excuse.  While I wish we could live in a world where after she was flatly refused the role of Tiana in The Princess and the Frog due to her arrogance about auditioning that she never got an opportunity to ruin a Disney Film, Disney seems to hate me these days so we gave her a role yours truly already wasn't the most fond of.  And, as one would expect, Beyonce siphons all of the joy out of the room with her weak performance as Nala.  She seems like she's literally reading from a script every time Nala is on screen and it's not even subtle.  She was basically there just to sing the lousy song they added in for her to sing (we'll get to that in a moment).  

Scar is also such an uneven villain in this performance that it's kind of sad.  Chiwetel Ejiofor is fairly decent in the role, but he seems to be trying to hard to evoke both Idris Elba's Shere Khan from The Jungle Book (2016) and Jeremy Irons's role from the original movie.  And both those roles are just incompatible.  Scar cannot be both a vicious brute and a sly and devious lion, but the movie tries to have Scar act both ways.  They also gave him the slimmest of backstories about his rivalry with Mufasa, but because it's only hinted at, we cannot really get behind either sympathizing or truly despising this iteration of Scar.  Let me put it to you this way, when I saw this film opening day in July of 2019, no one said a word when Scar met his end.  When I saw the original for it's re-release in 2011, people burst into applause to see Scar meet his end in that one.  When you're not even cheering for the villains defeat, you know you failed as a Disney storyteller.  

You know when I decided this film was bad?  The very first frame we see of it.  The 1994 Film explodes onto the scene with the pitch black screen and then the sun rises over the horizon in tune with the African Chants of Lebo M.  It made the Sun (AKA the Circle of Life) at the forefront of the picture and placed it in the center of the frame to emphasize it's importance.  The 2019 Film has a still few seconds of a lit up African Landscape until the sun creeps out from over the trees (Not the horizon, the trees) and Lebo's original chants from the first movie slapped onto the screen.  The sun isn't even in the center of the screen!  It's like Disney made the film without even thinking of what was most important about why it appealed to so many people.  

Speaking of which, the reason The Jungle Book's hyper-realistic animation worked is because you had actors who were emoting despite the animal characters not being able to show much of it.  The actors were so in tune with their characters that you almost didn't notice that Kaa or Bagheera couldn't emote much as animals.  What also helps is that The Jungle Book, while tonally flawed and confused, still knows what it wants to be in each and every scene, allowing for the film to move at a pace the actors/characters can shine in.  Where The Lion King fails while The Jungle Book succeeded was in the fact that for the most part (apart from Shere Khan killing Akela and one or two other scenes), The Jungle Book isn't a particularly emotionally evocative film.  And it doesn't try to be.  The Lion King's entire appeal is through it's emotional connection with both it's characters and the audience.  When you see that the hyper-realistic animation fails to capture the human emotions that are rampant throughout the original 1994 film in numerous scenes, it becomes a jarring and hollow experience to say the least.  Because the acting is so subpar and the animation is too realistic for it to be believable, Hans Zimmer has to basically carry this film on his back most of the time.  There are many instances where the lack of emotion on the faces of the characters hurts the film the most, but the primary scenes are the ones you would expect in where Simba comes across Mufasa's body and especially when Simba sees his father's ghost at the end of the film.  The actors (at least Donald Glover) is doing the best he can and the lines given are actually fairly powerful, but the animation of the scene is too realistic for us to be come emotionally invested.  And in a movie where the heart of it is the emotional connections it makes with the audiences, this is a terrible thing to endure.  

The music is also some of the most jarring I have ever heard in one of these animated musicals to this date.  "Circle of Life" is still the strongest song in the film, with the new vocals allowing me to not feel so suffocated by nostalgia despite reusing Lebo and the rest of his African Choir's chants from the original.  "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" was orchestrated okay, but the scene itself is almost unwatchable.  There is no cartoony styles or even a dream sequence where Disney's animators could have gone ham and made basically whatever they wanted.  It was literally Simba and Nala running around the watering hole until they lost Zazu.  "Hakuna Matata" isn't bad, it's just the fact that it again doesn't fit in this kind of story they are telling.  The song works for the original and the Broadway adaptations because they aren't supposed to be realistic takes on the story.  Here, they try to be cartoonish with the storyline, but it doesn't fit because we aren't allowed to see these characters emote thanks to the animation.  "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" is bad, but mostly because of my personal disdain for Beyonce and how I think she just butchered this song.  They honestly should have just done the full Elton John version and it probably would have worked better for the film emotionally.  The crown jewels of awful come from the likes of "Be Prepared" and the newest song "Spirit".  "Be Prepared" can't even really classify as a song.  It's just Chiwetel Ejiofor speak-singing his way through a muted and less theatrical version of the 1994 song.  All that made the original song so iconic is gone.  The beat, the pacing and the lyrics have all been shifted and moved about to make Scar's song more of a speech about the lion's fascist ideology instead of his theatrical plot to murder his brother and nephew.  But for all the faults of "Be Prepared", I have to give it "Spirit" as being one of the worst songs I have ever heard.  Ignoring the fact that Beyonce is the one singing it for a moment, let's take a look at where this song comes into the story.  Jon Favreau and the writing staff made the "odd" choice of excluding the most important scene in the film where Rafiki demonstrates the lesson of the film to Simba ("The Past Can Hurt" scene).  They skipped by Simba's doubts and fears so quickly, I genuinely thought they were going to rush into his fight with Scar, but of course they didn't.  Instead, we got to listen to a terrible Beyonce song while Simba ran the entire length from the Jungle back to Pride Rock.  And I mean the ENTIRE length.  The desert, the gorge and all the way back to them coming up to Pride Rock.  The 1994 Film made this scene so iconic not through a lazy and rushed together song, but through Hans Zimmer's score and animation techniques that Disney had never attempted before.  It's without a doubt one of the most powerful moments of the film from Simba running through the desert to his arrival just outside of Pride Rock ON HIS OWN instead of running back with Nala.  It makes Nala's role seem more important than it actually was.  Maybe if literally anyone else but Beyonce was singing here, it might have been good.  

The film is full from top to bottom with filler and fluff that makes the film longer than it should have been.  Three scenes stand out the most to me in this regard.  After the bombastic opening in "Circle of Life" we follow a mouse running around the Pride Lands for what seemed like a firm 90 seconds until it comes across the cave Scar was lurking in.  Did we really need to see this?  It's one of the flaws I have for Bambi, but at least that film has the excuse of being more about the whole story of the forest during Bambi's youth and not centralized around a small cast of characters.  The mouse in the original film is on screen for like 5 seconds before Scar's paw comes down to catch it.  The second scene is during the Stampede.  Time is of the essence to save Simba before he is trampled by Wildebeests, but we are shown the entirety of Mufasa's descent into the gorge, which takes a solid 20 or so seconds, whereas in the original film it takes maybe 5 seconds tops.  I know they were trying to make it more realistic and you can't have Mufasa literally diving into the gorge, but if you want to make a realistic film out of something that needs to be as grand and spectacular as The Lion King, you've already lost.  The third and without a doubt most frustrating scene is HANDS DOWN when Rafiki learns Simba is still alive.  Unlike in the 1994 film, where Simba sighs into a pile of leaves that carries down towards Rafiki's tree, in this film Simba loses a tuft of his mane that is (please note, I am NOT joking here when I type these words!) eaten by a giraffe, shit out, and brought up to Rafiki's tree by a dung beetle.  And without any of the mysticism of the original, he basically just blurts out Simba's name.  It's like Favreau did this film just for a paycheck (which stinks because of how much I enjoy Elf and the original Iron Man)

What's Good?: I've bashed this film enough for one blog post.  So, what do I like about this film?  Well, once again, Hans Zimmer is the unsung MVP of The Lion King.  His rich orchestral scores, even when evoking the original film, are simply too powerful for me to even find a solid critique of.  I mean, I probably could, but Hans Zimmer is the last person who deserves it as far as I'm concerned.  The man is a wizard with music and I give him credit where it's due.  If this film had a watered down film score, it might be the worst of these films by far, but I'm sticking to my guns and saying Aladdin is worse.  

Donald Glover is also a fairly good Simba.  I at first wasn't a fan, but the more I thought about it, Matthew Broderick wasn't exactly a superstar in the acting department as Simba in the first film, so I lowered by expectations for a second viewing.  And I'm pleased to say I was impressed with him.  He wasn't Oscar worthy, but he did handle the emotional scenes of the film better than I think both JD McCrary and Matthew Broderick did in their respective roles.  A fair balance of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Donald Glover would probably have been for the best.  Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner are also fairly decent as Pumbaa and Timon respectively.  They don't try too hard to evoke Ernie Sabella and Nathan Lane and take the roles over for themselves.  Seth Rogen's Pumbaa is probably my favorite role for a comedian I otherwise think is just "meh" overall.  

Maybe it was because both Kingdom Hearts III and Aladdin (2019) beat me down so badly earlier in the year, but I left the film feeling nothing when I saw it.  Not anger, not joy, not depression.  Just...nothing.  It didn't hurt me that much and it didn't offend me too much.  It was just a poor adaptation.  And comparing that to how I felt about Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, I think that is more or less a step in the right direction.  

Overall: If not for Cinderella (2015), this would probably be the best film of all of these.  It's terrible, it's lazy and above all it leaves you feeling emotionally stale unless you have the attention span of a gnat or just really love Beyonce, but unlike the few films that proceeded it, it actually does try in some parts of it.  Some parts it does better than the original, but it's biggest flaw is that the original exists already and has touched far more people than this cheap imitation ever could or would.  If you had to choose between the original film and the cheap imitation that technically wasn't that cheap (the film cost a ton of money to make), why would you ever pick this one over the original?  
 

Film Review #127: Aladdin (2019)

Oh god this one is gonna hurt...

As usual, the Teaser Trailer of Aladdin suckered me in back around the Holiday Season of 2018 and I had my hopes set up that the remake of one of my all time favorite movies would at the very least seem palatable.  Sure, Will Smith would never be able to replicate what Robin Williams did for the original film, the music was probably going to be a touch lesser than the original and there were going to be changes that I didn't agree with, but I'm sure Disney learned their mistakes with Beauty and the Beast and would understand just how much people love the original film and would do it the biggest amount of justice they've ever done one of these films.  I know I should have been more skeptical, but I needed to have faith in this film during a really emotionally vulnerable state.  I should have guessed that signing on a guy like Guy Ritchie to direct was a terrible move as he hadn't directed anything of excellent quality since Snatch, which came out almost 20 years earlier.  I should have also guessed when people were saying that the guy signed on to play Jafar was not only better looking than the guy they signed on to play Aladdin, but was also the wrong choice when Ben Kingsley was sitting there and just perfect to play the part of one of Disney's most famous villains.  I should have been put off by how Disney kept celebrating that James Earl Jones would be back to play Mufasa in The Lion King, but Disney could not be bothered to bring back Gilbert Gottfried to play Iago.  The fact that Beauty and the Beast itself exists should have warned me that this film was going to be bad.  But, while I was going through familial drama and enduring both my mixed feelings towards Kingdom Hearts III and the final season of "Game of Thrones", I had a bit of hope that this film would be good.  

I am not permitting myself to make my depression addled self make any judgments about films anymore.  This movie is a laborious chore to sit through.  The cinematography is scatterbrained, the jokes are stale, the acting is subpar at best and the story ideas and takes on the original movie are just so bad that I genuinely think this is one of the worst big budget Hollywood movies ever made.  There is almost nothing I can say about this film that is even remotely positive.  Luckily for this, Disney has proceeded to make a film worse than Aladdin, but this one hurts the most because of how much I love the original film.  I don't even want to go into this one, but I do have commitments...

Plot: Two children on a ship out to sea harp to their father about hearing a story and their father relents and tells them the tale of the Magic Lamp in the faraway kingdom of Agrabah...

Within this Arabian City lives a thief named Aladdin (Mena Massoud), who must steal to survive.  While he is involved in one of his daily jaunts through the streets, he encounters a beautiful young woman whom he surmises was a servant in the palace and is smitten with her.  After saving her from an angry merchant and eluding the Palace Guards, the two bond, but she rushes back to the palace when a new suitor for the Princess arrives.  Realizing his monkey sidekick Abu stole a valuable piece of jewelry from the woman, Aladdin sneaks into the palace to restore it to her, but is captured in the process of trying to escape.  

Aladdin is then introduced to the Grand Vizier of Agrabah, an aspiring sorcerer named Jafar (Marwan Kenzari).  Jafar convinces Aladdin that the woman he had interacted with was actually Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott), but advises him that as a commoner, he could not hope to win the Princess without the riches needed.  He offers Aladdin the wealth he would need if the street urchin would venture into the deadly Cave of Wonders to fetch for him a mysterious lamp.  Aladdin does so and manages to nearly escape the collapsing cave with the help of a flying Magic Carpet, but Jafar double-crosses Aladdin and leaves him to rot in the cave forever, but ultimately fails to realize Abu snatched the Magic Lamp from him before it was too late.  While in the cave, Aladdin rubs the lamp and summons the all powerful Genie (Will Smith) that dwells inside.  The Genie informs Aladdin that he has the power to grant him three wishes, though Aladdin uses resourcefulness to trick the Genie into freeing him from the cavern without using a wish.  When out of the Cave, both Aladdin and Genie inform the other of their most passionate dreams (wooing Princess Jasmine for Aladdin and gaining his freedom for The Genie).  After Aladdin promises to use his last wish to free the Genie from his prison, he uses a wish to become Prince Ali in order to hopefully be able to wed Jasmine.  But can Jasmine love him for being something he wasn't?  Would the Genie be able to help Aladdin act more princely?  And would Jafar simply sit idly by and give up on his own ambitions to rule the universe?  

What's Wrong?: Where do I even begin with this one?  I guess we'll have to start with the changes the film made to the original.  They added a bunch of story elements, such as a backstory to Jafar and an expanded role for Jasmine's new handmaiden, but a lot of the things added just don't make any sense.  Jafar has this bizarre hatred for the neighboring kingdom where Jasmine's mother was said to have come from.  At first, I thought it would be because Jafar has control of the military and could make himself more powerful, but that idea is tossed aside quickly.  Then, I thought it would be motivational, like Jafar originally came from there and was cast out some unexplained incident that would motivate him to seek power, but nothing came of it.  It was actually comical seeing Jafar so hellbent on destroying a neighboring kingdom to spite Jasmine and the Sultan, but not in the funny way.  He just randomly wants to commit genocide on a kingdom and is only thwarted by his last wish technically exposing him to the power of a Genie.  Speaking of which, Jafar's defeat in this is the same as in the original movie, but here they make the weird decision to have Genie in on Aladdin's plan to imprison Jafar in a lamp.  It was interesting to see the original Genie thinking Aladdin went completely insane as he fed Jafar's ego, but here it makes Jafar just seem less intelligent than most in the room.  Which may have been the idea they were after, but that's a terrible way to show it.  

There are also plenty of plotholes in the film if you just disregard the whole Jafar wants to destroy kingdoms thing.  One of the most egregious ones is that while transforming Aladdin into a prince, the Genie tells him that he made it so that no one in Agrabah would recognize him upon his arrival, but less than a few hours in Jafar recognizes him, which makes things all the more confusing as Jafar simply doesn't just storm into Aladdin's chambers and steal the lamp then, but instead recycles the trope of Jafar having Aladdin drowned to get him out of the way.  Did he not realize that if Aladdin had indeed been a prince, it would have started a war with a foreign nation if a murder attempt was discovered?  Also, the whole mistaken identity thing with Jasmine at the beginning where she pretends she isn't the Princess is kind of strange to me, especially when she's in the Palace.  It worked for the original movie because the reveal was made at the precise time Aladdin was arrested by the guards on Jafar's orders.  Here, it's just bizarre.  But it adds a few "comedic" aspects to the story, so whatever.  

The casting of this film is seriously hit and miss.  The fact that Disney fans were in uproar about someone other than James Earl Jones playing Mufasa or Danny DeVito playing Phil in the remake of Hercules, but we can't have Gilbert Gottfried come back to play Iago?  Alan Tudyk's Iago is barely a character worth mentioning, as the only times he ever talks is to himself or to Jafar.  His performance is way too much like an actual parrot instead of the loudmouthed sidekick to one of Disney's most famous villains.  Mena Massoud is a tolerable Aladdin, though I will admit the whole modern day speech in a fairy tale thing is starting to grate on my last nerves, the original film included.  But the crown jewel for bad performances comes from Marwan Kenzari's performance as Jafar.  I thought Disney would do these villains a bit of justice after both Cate Blanchett and Idris Elba did great in their roles as Lady Tremaine and Shere Khan in the remakes of Cinderella and The Jungle Book.  I thought that the awful portrayal of Gaston by Luke Evans was going to be a blip on the radar and that Disney would nail their villains from this point on.  Kenzari would have been a serviceable guard or servant to Jafar, but he lacks basically everything that made Jafar such an awesome villain in the original Aladdin.  He does not have the chilling voice, the sinister cackle or even the fiendish ambitions of one of Disney's greatest villains.  He is just horribly miscast here.  Do you know who would have made an excellent Jafar?  Ben Kingsley?  Why didn't Disney just contact him to be Jafar after he was a solid Bagheera?  I don't know...

The orchestrations for the songs are also pretty terrible.  While I appreciated the work done to "Arabian Nights" to make it a more robust and mysterious opening number for the film, the work done on "Friend Like Me", "Prince Ali" and "A Whole New World" are definitely below quality.  This isn't the fault of Alan Menken entirely, but it's clear that the hip hop style of songs that Will Smith was best known for doesn't gel well with the clearly meant for Broadway and Musical styled numbers of the original.  It's particularly jarring considering that I thought Naomi Scott did great as a singing voice for Jasmine, it's just that the song was too "popish" for my liking.  

Speaking of Jasmine, this film does her a very ironic disservice in this film.  Jasmine is given a power ballad in this film about how she no longer wishes to be kept silent by the oppressive and male dominated kingdom of Agrabah.  She sings the first version of it after being ridiculed by Jafar for speaking her mind, but then her big moment is after Jafar seizes control of Agrabah and demands her obedience.  Jasmine defiantly sings her otherwise okay song, but the moment her song ends, Jafar threatens to kill her father if she doesn't shut up and get in line, which she does immediately.  Way to prove that you have no respect for the women you are trying to pander to.  First in this film then in Frozen II, it's just comical how Disney missed the bar here.  It's genuinely hilarious to see a company preach how it's supportive of feminism and feminist ideals, only to have Jasmine revert quickly back into a Damsel in Distress waiting for Aladdin to save the day.  

The film is horrifically unfunny.  While I'm sure having both Robin Williams and Gilbert Gottfried in the original film more than made up the comedy end, this film does not have that benefit.  They constantly reuse the same jokes and overplay them, such as Iago squawking at Jafar about being the "second" best person in Agrabah or an entire segment dedicated just to the word "jams".  I haven't seen an allegedly funny film bomb this badly since Jack and Jill. 

Finally, I have to say something about the editing.  The film is clearly edited to be more like a cartoon than either Dumbo or Beauty and the Beast were.  But with the clearly live action scenes, it simply looks odd.  This is especially prevalent in the "One Jump Ahead" scene, where they clearly edit Aladdin and Jasmine to be moving at the speeds a cartoon character would run, but then fast edit's it back to normal speed so the two could still be singing the song at the same time as doing the actions.  If you're going to try to evoke the cartoon origins of the film while also maintaining it's live action integrity, you may as well have just reissued the original film.  Or at the very least, imitate what the stage shows of the story have done over the years.  The editing is not only visually distracting, but it takes me out of the scene almost as badly as the next Live Action Remake we'll be discussing.  

What's Good?: While he isn't and will never be Robin Williams, I have to give Will Smith credit for putting his own spin on the character of Genie.  I was so afraid that Disney was going to have Will Smith acting like Robin Williams with all the zany pop culture referencing stuff he did in his take on the character, but they manage to avoid that for the most part.  Will Smith's Genie proves that he has slightly flexible morals (such as his trickery of Jafar into making him wish to be the most powerful being in the world and "more powerful than the Genie"), which makes him a bit more street smart and clever than the Robin Williams Genie we know and love.  His singing is also on point for what the songs are trying to be.  So it certainly isn't his fault why I don't like the orchestrations of the songs.  I also thought there was a decent amount of chemistry between his character and the handmaiden of Jasmines.  I'd daresay there was more chemistry there than with Aladdin and Jasmine.  

As I alluded to before, Naomi Scott is also a solid Jasmine.  For a Disney Princess I've always been very mixed towards, she did a decent job of bringing Jasmine to life for a new generation of kids seeing her for the first time (though why these kids weren't shown the 1992 version before this, I will never know).  She sings well, acts well and certainly looks the part of a gorgeous Arabian Princess.  She gets a pass.  

Overall: The next several Disney Live Action Remakes could be as good films as The Godfather or The Empire Strikes Back combined and it wouldn't make up for the hole this film dug for Disney in terms of these remakes.  They are just objectively worse as a whole group than their original films.  Even the decent ones like Cinderella don't have enough to make up for the awfulness of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.  This film is the crown jewel of how not to make a live action reboot of an Animated Film.  It adds nothing but misery to the legacy of the original and was nothing more than just a cheap and lazy cash grab on Disney's part.  But, since it was successful, I guess Disney will be polluting our theater screens and home screens with these for another decade or so.  Thanks guys.  You ruined movies for a decade.  

 

Film Review #126: Dumbo (2019)

 Before I go into the probably unfinishable posts about how "Game of Thrones" has ruined roughly a decade of my life in how it ended and left a rotten taste in my mouth, I have to say that it wasn't the only thing that ruined 2019 for me.  

To put it bluntly, 2019 was a very down year for me, personally.  A family squabble resulted in my Father and I having to leave our home, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, my Stepfather was stricken with cancer (which he succumbed to in October of 2020) and I had to endure a full scale of bad times that seemed to be relentless in it's drive to make me miserable.  There were positives, as I got back into working on my channel after moving and made several LPs and celebrated my 10th Anniversary on YouTube.  I got to spend my 25th Birthday in the Walt Disney World Resort and got to do everything I wanted to do, including riding all the new rides (Rise of the Resistance hadn't opened yet) and getting to meet my favorite Disney Princess for the first time in Ariel.  Kingdom Hearts III also finally came out in 2019 and I played it, loved it, played it again, hated it, played it a third time and have come to live with it.  The new Star Wars Trilogy ended like a wet fart in a funeral home.  The MCU came to what should have been it's natural end as Avengers: Endgame wrapped up all of the plotlines of the early MCU and went out on what would have been a high note had Disney not become enamored with all of our money during the pandemic.  

Speaking of the Mouse House, they also have been quite a busy company haven't they?  Since Beauty and the Beast came out in 2017 (I still hate it with a burning passion), they have released numerous sequels, prequels and remakes to all of their classically loved content.  Though I promise I will cover both Christopher Robin and Mary Poppins Returns in their own time, I feel that since my site was built with a firm backbone towards Disney Feature Animation, I should start there with their remakes.  And while I have many things to say about Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan and Cruella, I have to start with the one that nobody remembers, or the one that no one chose to remember because it was basically as forgettable and mediocre a film as it could be.  

I don't hate Dumbo.  My hate for the next two films will be much more in the norm for how I feel about these films.  Dumbo is about as mediocre as it could be.  It's not a good film, has numerous contrivances and plot holes and has almost nothing to do with the original film, which in of itself has become noteworthy of late with Disney's censoring of many parts of their older films (including Peter Pan which I am thankful for).  Would I call this the most inept of the Disney Remakes?  No.  Would I call this the most worthless film of the lot?  That honor goes to Mulan.  But is it worth a watch for you if you have no other shows to catch up on?  Also no.  

Plot: The film begins with the return to the circus of a man named Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), who has been forced to become an amputee following his service in the First World War.  The circus has been having financial troubles due to the outbreak of the Spanish Flu and the Ringmaster (Danny DeVito) reveals he cannot give him his old job back, but can hire him to care for the pregnant Mrs. Jumbo, who gives birth to a baby elephant with abnormally large ears.  Though the Ringmaster tries to hide the baby from the public, the crowds soon see him and mock the baby by calling him "Dumbo" and throwing peanuts at him during a performance.  Fearful for the wellbeing of her calf, Mrs. Jumbo goes on a rampage and ultimately gets separated from her son after one of the handlers dies due to her onslaught.  While comforting the baby, Holt's son and daughter discover that the ears actually are large enough to allow Dumbo to fly.  

When Dumbo is initially forced to join a gang of clowns, he shocks and amazes the audiences by flying around the big top, attracting the attention of a greedy businessman named V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton).  Wanting to exploit Dumbo's gift for his special amusement park, Vandevere joins forces with the Circus and brings them into his own massive (clearly commentary on Disneyland) amusement park.  But when Dumbo starts to defy his orders, Vendevere schemes to euthanize Dumbo's mother and compel him to work directly for him, Holt and his family become determined to reunite Dumbo and his mother and get them to the one place they would be safe from the ambitious entrepreneur: Africa.  

What's Wrong?: Have you ever watched one of these films and wondered how they took a movie with a reasonably short run time and turn it into a two hour spectacle?  The dreaded "F" word...Filler.  This movie is chock full of filler.  To be fair, the original film also had a decent amount of filler in it, but at least there it was all to get the film up to reasonably feature length.  This movie is just an endless amount of filler.  And it unfortunately comes from Disney's most disturbing trend they've had yet with these movies: being {as the political commentators call it} woke.  Of course Holt's daughter has to be passionately into science during a time when it was extremely rare for women to have roles outside of the house (Marie Curie was the exception to the rule).  It's not like Disney's ever done a film where a bookish and smart girl is misunderstood by the world she lives in...oh wait, they did.  Twice!  

The biggest culprit of Disney trying to apply a modern twist on ideas from a time nearly 100 years earlier, however, is definitely the circus angle.  In recent years, circuses have been shutting down thanks to a very long crusade by animal right's activists who believe the many small and large circuses abuse these animals to make them perform tricks for the audiences amusement.  A noble effort to be sure, but this film takes place immediately after World War I.  The Star Spangled Banner was still not being sung at all sporting events.  Civil Rights were 50 years off.  Women had literally just gotten the right to vote.  This kind of idealistic thinking would work in a take on Dumbo from the modern age, but not in this particular time frame.  It would be like evoking the desire to save the planet from Global Warming when science didn't even seem to be remotely interested in it at the time.  It just doesn't make sense for the world of the story that they created.  Yes, many of the remaining circuses in the world no longer use formerly wild animals and places like SeaWorld don't make the whale jump around for your amusement anymore.  These are great developments for us as people, but would NEVER have flown in the 1910s and 1920s.  I

Also, I find it a little insulting to the original film that they completely changed the morals and lessons of the original film.  Yes, it's an antiquated message that I even make fun of whenever Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is on the radio in Christmas time (IE, society will mock and deride an abnormality about you until it is beneficial to them), but the moral of the story should at least be in a similar ballpark to the original.  The idea that Dumbo and his mother need to go back to Africa isn't a terrible idea, but if this story took place in the same universe as the original film, Africa wouldn't even be on the map for them.  Dumbo becomes a celebrity and manages to secure his mother's freedom.  That alone is an interesting concept for any kind of film, not just a Disney Film.  

The callbacks to this film are also fairly annoying.  The Pink Elephants scene from the original, despite having no bearings on the plot outside of getting Dumbo drunk enough to fly into a tree away from the circus, was an artistically insane and wonderful moment to experience.  But in this film, it's just a quick little segment with elephants made out of bubbles.  

What's Good?: This might be the most palatable Tim Burton movie I've seen since Big Fish.  I even forgot that he was the director in some aspects as this film lacks a lot of the generic "Burtonness" that is so clearly surrounding all of his other films, including his other Disney Remake in Alice in Wonderland.  He seems to be trending into a more level area in terms of his directing and this is definitely better than some of the other awful films he's done.  

The acting in this movie, while cheesy in many aspects, is also pretty good.  Colin Farrell is as always a good actor and both Danny DeVito and Michael Keaton are enjoyable roles as well.  The kid actors are just meh, but I'd say one of the best performances goes to Eva Green as the performer of Colette in Vandevere's show.  Not Oscar worthy, but she can at least sell the idea of the story well enough that I think it's worth mentioning.  

While Dumbo's CGI can be a little overbearing, in comparison to the next two films we'll be talking about, it's definitely more watered down.  It's probably because of how much smaller the budget of this film was in comparison to both Aladdin and The Lion King, but I can appreciate this film not being a CGI slopfest that so many films have become over the years.  

Overall: Dumbo's greatest flaws are in it's forgettability.  I may detest Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin with the passion of a fiery thousand suns, but I know those remakes have their fans.  I don't know why, but they do.  This film doesn't have anyone who talks about it.  I mean, it made about 25% of what it's predecessor and successor made, so it makes sense, but there are not many vocal fans out there.  It's kind of like a Film Fart.  It happened, it was generally unpleasant but inoffensive, but nobody is going to really remember this film for anything.  The original film at least has the controversies of it's past to hang it's hat on (the Pink Elephants scene, the racist crows and the music).  But this one?  Well, it's kind of a skippable film.  Not terrible, but probably not worth your time.