Review of The Lion King (2019) by Colginator — 20 Jul 2019

With the success of Faverau's Jungle Book and the leaps forward in CGI technology, it was only going to be so long before a Disney exec thought of doing a remake of their most successful film during the Disney Renaissance. But they were so preoccupied with whether they could recreate the Lion King almost shot for shot that they never stopped to think whether they should. The end result will undoubtedly be a massive money maker for Disney by capitalizing on the success of one of their greatest films, but it's also quite possibly the most creatively bankrupt film to come out this year.

We all know the plot of the first film and this remake follows the original almost verbatim. So much of the dialogue is just taken word for word out of the original and many shots are so identical that I'm convinced that they just used stills from the original as storyboards. Other than one extra scene showing how Nala set off on her journey where she finds Simba and some extended sequences following some random animals unrelated to the plot, including an adept metaphor for the film where we're forced to watch a beetle pushing around a large piece of dung, there's very little here which departs from the original story.

So if this does follow the original so closely then how did it turn out so bad? To start off with, as impressive as some of these photo realistic animations are this style wasn't well suited for the Lion King. Instead of having the expressionistic and lively characters from the original, we get these lions who are unable to emote and deliver on the films emotional moments. It's very difficult to connect with these characters since they just can't convey as much visually as the original was capable of and characters like Mufasa just don't resonate in the same way.

The original animated films more minimalistic style also works to its advantage so that shots flow together smoother and allows for quicker edits because we are capable of reading all the information in a shot in a shorter amount of time. The heightened realism of this remake just isn't capable of doing this as it needs to hold on its shots just so we can absorb all the information on screen. Plus on a more simplistic level, the original animation just looks better. The epic scale of some of the shots in that film feel permanently engraved in my mind, but whilst the remake has me appreciate the effort and time that animators must have put in to these shots it just doesn't deliver on the same sense of awe it attempts to recreate from the original.

Then there's the new cast and in spite of having a lot of great names attached to the film, it ends up feeling as if the characters are going through the motions of the story with little emotional weight. Very few of the performances are able to bounce off one another effectively and feel completely disconnected from their surroundings. This is with the exception of some of the comedic support like Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner and John Oliver who were all entertaining. Though this is partly because these seemed to be the only characters where the actors brought their personalities to the role and felt like they delivered on some funny lines.

But my biggest gripe of this film is it's complete lack of originality. Most of these remakes of Disney animated classics have copied the originals they were based on, but they all added at least something to the story. Even for as much as I disliked the live action Beauty and the Beast, they still made some attempts to improve characters like LeFou and tried to add their own ideas to how the curse works. But here they don't try to add anything substantially different to the characters or story, instead only adding new shots of the surrounding nature to show off the photo-realistic animation and pad out the films run-time. They even skip over some of the small moments that made the original film so incredible to begin with. One example is how they take out Rafiki's lesson about how the past can hurt and instead just cut to Simba running off to catch up with Nala. This is replaced by a montage of the two Lions running across the wild to a new Beyonce song, which feels completely out of place and was likely just added to the film so they could sell an extra Beyonce song on the films soundtrack.

Ultimately the film just feels like a carbon copy of the original. It's like listening to someone speak the lyrics to a great song, all the words are there but it lacks the same beat which made the song connect with you to begin with. Whilst it's not necessarily the worst film of the year, but it is definitely the most pointless.