Review of West Side Story (2021) by Butterballer1 — 14 Dec 2021

Spielberg accelerates his descent into irrelevence with a forgettable musical that should have been a lot of fun.

This felt like a bland paint-by-numbers musical with nothing new to offer except what I later found out is Spielberg's heavy-handed diversity quotient. Diversity doesn't make a product good. It can only make a product better if it is suited for the material and if the actors are also chosen for their talent and the scripts are written to their strengths. This clearly was not the case with this film in which Spielgberg cares only about casting for race (which is not inherently bad in such a story, but it can't be the only thing...) and insists on making the Spanish language sections be unsubtitled in order to shame people who don't speak Spanish. This is a nice-looking nothing burger with a heavy side of forced social lecturing for absolutely no reason. The original material already handles such topics in a much more entertaining and effective way.