One of the movies I saw earlier
this year that I never got around to reviewing was Disney’s live action remake
of Aladdin, and the reason I didn’t get around to it is because it’s
hard to stretch “It sucks, just watch the original” into 800 words. It was an
aggressively mediocre by-the-numbers remake of the original that didn’t make
enough substantial changes to justify its own existence. I do recognize that
one purpose of the recent string of live-action remakes of classic Disney
movies (besides milking audiences for nostalgia dollars) is to give themselves a
mulligan on some of their properties by making retroactive changes to some
aspects that haven’t aged well and make them more modern and woke in the
safest, most unconfrontational way. It’s less of a deconstruction and more of a
lighthearted roast. The Lion King doesn’t even try to be
self-referential in any manner. Not surprising since the 1994 original is widely
considered the crown jewel of the Disney Renaissance and changing anything
would be considered sacrilege, but its that rigid adherence to the original and
its dedication to photorealism that lead to its ultimate undoing.
If you’ve seen the original
before, the story has hardly changed at all. Simba (JD McCrary) is a young lion
cub being raised by his father Mufasa (James Earl Jones) to take his place as
king of the pride lands. After Mufasa is killed by his treacherous brother Scar
(Chiwetel Ejiofor), Simba is exiled and meets up with a meerkat named Timon
(Billy Eichner) and a warthog named Pumbaa (Seth Rogen), who teach him their carefree
lifestyle of running away from your problems. Years pass, and a now adult Simba
(Donald Glover) hears from his childhood friend Nala (Beyoncé) that Scar has
run the kingdom into the ground by not respecting the circle of life, and after
receiving a pep talk from Mufasa’s ghost, bucks up and sets off to reclaim the
throne.
Before I tear into this misbegotten
mess like a wounded antelope, I do want to give this movie some praise. The
big draw of new Lion King is that it was rendered with hyper-realistic animation,
and combined with Caleb Deschanel’s stellar cinematography, it looks absolutely
amazing. Utilizing some of the animation techniques used in video games, there
isn’t a single pixel onscreen that isn’t made of 1’s and 0’s. As a measuring
stick for showing how far animation has come in the past 25 years, it’s truly
something to behold. But rendering lifelike animals is nothing new. Hell, Crawl
was able to do the same, and that was made for a fraction of what it cost to
get Beyoncé to show up to her recording sessions. But I can’t recall it being done
on this grand a scale outside of a video game. It doesn’t look too different
from a lost episode of Planet Earth, aside from the fact that these
animals are talking and singing.
It’s that last part where the
movie hits its first snafu. Rendering realistic lions may have pulled it out of
the uncanny valley, but plopping them into a fantastical story where
stylization would’ve been more beneficial drags it back in. Half the reason original
Lion King worked was because animation allowed the characters to express
themselves in unique ways. Even the musical understood this. And since real
animals don’t express themselves facially, each character has the same placid
face whether they’re happy, sad, scared, angry, surprised or constipated. Simba’s
reaction to watching his father get thrown off a cliff is no different from
when he’s eating bugs with Timon and Pumbaa. The result is about as convincing
as Mister Ed. But considering that CATS! is coming out
this Christmas, I should probably be happy that this’ll be the least horrifying
digital simulacrum of talking felines I’ll see this year.
But that’s nothing compared to
what they did to the script. And by that, I mean they did nothing to it at all.
And therein lies the problem. I’m not against remakes on principle (one
of my favorite movies of last year was a remake), but I’m of the mindset
that if you’re going to remake something, especially if that something is as
treasured as the original, you sure as hell better do something different, or
at least interesting with them. Say what you will about Beauty and the Beast
or Aladdin, at least they tried to shake things up a little by
adding some pointless subplots or forgettable new songs or retroactively making
one of the characters gay. The Lion King couldn’t even be bothered with
that. This isn’t so much of a remake as it is a xerox. Most of the movie’s iconic
scenes have been painstakingly recreated nearly shot for shot, but slightly
lesser thanks to its leap from 2D to 3D. The Hangover Part 2 was less derivative
of its predecessor. Gus Van Sandt’s remake of Psycho was a less
shameless copycat than this.
Bottom line, The Lion King
is everything wrong with late stage capitalism in movie form. It’s a hollow,
soulless, cynical cash grab devoid of everything that made its predecessor
special, made solely to wring as many nostalgia dollars out of a property that’s
already spawned two direct-to-video sequels, a hit Broadway musical, two TV
shows and God knows how much merch. We may have given Disney a pass because
they gave us Pixar, Marvel and revived Star Wars, but it’s that
complacency that lead them to buying up nearly 30% of the entertainment industry with
little to no resistance, and this is our punishment; a never-ending procession
of digital homunculi masquerading as childhood memories. I wouldn’t be
surprised if this was all just a test run on this technology before they use it
to build a hologram of Robert Downey Jr., bring Tony Stark back from the dead
and shoehorn him into every Marvel movie until the inevitable heat death of the
universe. In conclusion, fuck this movie, fuck everyone who let this movie
happen, and fuck me for giving them my money.
2/10
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