No time to be sad, you have to sing. Why The Little Mermaid Is A Stuffy, Ugly And Completely Pointless Remake

On May 26, the premiere of the film "The Little Mermaid" took place. Disney has released a remake of their own cartoon.

The start of work on a remake became known in 2016. Filming started only in 2021 - during this time, Lindsay Lohan and Harry Styles, who could play the main roles, dropped out of the project, and the audience had already become accustomed to Disney remakes.

Rob Marshall (Memoirs of a Geisha, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) is directing. The screenplay was written by David Maggie (Life of Pi, My Terrible Neighbor). The music was composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) and Alan Menken, who wrote the music for the original The Little Mermaid.

The plot of the remake exactly repeats the plot of the original. The mermaid Ariel falls in love with a man, so she agrees to a deal with the witch Ursula - she changes her voice to her feet. She has only a couple of days to kiss the prince - only in this case she can remain human.

Slow story kills

The original cartoon lasted 83 minutes, the remake - 135 minutes. To understand how slow the new film turned out, one fact is enough - Ariel makes a deal with Ursula at about the 60th minute. Apparently, it is possible to negotiate with the witch only after she sang on the mini-album.

The situation with the plot is twofold. If you did not know anything about the history of the Mermaid, then perhaps the viewing will be at least a little interesting. If you know (and remember well) the original cartoon, you will be asking yourself, “Why am I here?”. It's almost a frame-by-frame remake that's also slowed down.

Songs ruin the movie

If you leave out the songs from the film, it will be reduced by almost half. There are too many of them, they are long, sometimes there are practically no pauses between them. Because of them, the timekeeping is inflated to an unbearable length - by the way, the children simply can’t stand it and leave the cinema half an hour before the end.

It's amazing how weird the songs seem. Pathetic, even pompous - sometimes it seems that they are being sung in some regular music show from the federal TV channel. Some of them migrated from the original cartoon (sometimes in a modified form), others were written specifically for the remake. Including rap, which is read by a seagull. 2023, after all.

Alan Menken wrote the music for the original, but he was also called to the remake. This is a familiar task for him - he has already returned to "Aladdin" when Guy Ritchie reshot it, as well as to "Beauty and the Beast" in 2017. Each time the composer tries to freshen up his old music a little, but he fails. Just because the music from the original The Little Mermaid was appropriate and timely in the eighties, that's where it should have stayed.

The cast fails

The Little Mermaid has a good cast, but it doesn't work at all. Obviously, this is a failure of the director.

Halle Bailey looks great as Ariel. The problem is that they didn't write any interesting lines for her, so the character turned out to be meaningless. And at the beginning, and in the middle, and at the end of the film, Ariel is a naive girl who does not understand anything. Bailey just portrays surprise and, if you're lucky, sadness, but not much - there is no time to be sad, you have to sing. Obviously, if there was a good script, there would be a great Ariel, but the actress was not so lucky.

In the trailer, Triton (ie Javier Bardem) looked comical. In the film, he looks like nothing, he is practically motionless and rarely depicts emotions. It seems like the actor didn't even show up to the set, so the director just printed out his face and put it on an extra. Either Bardem was confused by what was happening. The result was not the king of the seas, but a tortured uncle.

Prior to watching, it seemed that Melissa McCarthy as a villain was a great hit. But she, like Bardem, is obsessed with one emotion, so looking at her is boring. The actress endlessly screams at the painted tentacles, and the final scene with her participation looks like a mockery of the original.

But the prince looks like a prince from old fairy tales. But is he any better than this? His video (the episode where he sings) is reminiscent of New Year's TV shows, where the stars put on stupid costumes and grimace to the old songs. It is unlikely that the actor is to blame here either - you can again recall the hopeless scenario.

The underwater world makes you bored

The filmmakers made several important decisions before working on the remake. Firstly, they decided that the underwater world would be beautiful, and secondly, they took a step towards naturalism. It seems that it was necessary to choose one thing, but it did not work out to sit on two chairs.

The main problem is revealed already at the very beginning - water is not like water. Rather, someone used a simple filter to hint that the action takes place in the ocean. It is enough to remember the second part of "Avatar" to understand how water in a movie can look like. But Rob Marshall is not James Cameron.

In theory, it was possible to abandon naturalism and simply draw a colorful world - as in the original. The authors take half measures, so deliberately bright and realistic underwater inhabitants are nearby. So the scenes are obtained where the cartoon octopus is adjacent to the usual shrimp. It all looks like someone mixed hundreds of sketches meant for different projects.

But the bright Flounder was turned into a naturalistic flounder - I wonder who even came up with this idea? Or is Pumbaa the warthog not enough for Disney?

Low expectations help

It is unlikely that anyone expected a breakthrough from The Little Mermaid. Another remake from a studio that's obsessed with remakes. Mulan, Pinocchio, Lady and the Tramp, Cruella, Aladdin, Dumbo, The Lion King, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, "Peter Pan and Wendy" are films that have been released in the past few years, and this despite the fact that the premieres were postponed due to pandemics.

It is not surprising that The Little Mermaid does not shine with originality - this is the case when they shoot in order to shoot. Against the backdrop of low expectations, it turned out not so bad - that is, the film is not terrible, but simply bad.

Of course, witnesses to the agenda accuse The Little Mermaid of following trends, including because of the skin color of the main character. Apparently, a girl with a fish tail can exist, but only white. Here in Baikal the mermaids are white...

The Little Mermaid is another pointless remake that parasitizes on the original. The authors decided that they would not invent anything while reshooting the cartoon. The normal reaction of the viewer is also not to invent anything and watch the original. And you can laugh at Javier Bardem and the talking flounder without going to the cinema - just a trailer.