Surprisingly good, even great!

Rating: 8/10 (1 September 2019)

As someone who finds the idea of Disney 'live-action' remakes (read cash-grabs) loathsome, and as someone bored to death by their previous Cinderella and B & B live-action remakes, I was very pleasantly swept off my feet by just how much I ended up loving this movie! This is particularly surprising since I watched the movie with the sole intent of hating on everything, only to fall in love with it in just the first few scenes.
When it comes to remaking a classic, there's always a catch-22 : make zero changes and have it be a soul-less redundancy, or make changes and have everyone call blasphemy and hate you. Aladdin succeeds however, by clever story-telling decisions and creating a fine balance between freshness and retaining the essense of the original that everyone loves.
This ingenuity is evident in the very first scenes. I was all prepared to be bored by an egoistic attempt to rehash the introductory scenes of the original that we have all watched 100s of time. Instead, they jumped right into the essence of the story - a sense of awe and wonder that they helped us channel through the kids who wanted to hear a story, following by taking us to sweeping shots of Agrabah drawing us into this magical orient, and finally focusing straight on the story by showing us how Aladdin and Jasmine meet without wasting any time.
Apart from the story-telling, I loved the costumes and sets, the music, the humour, and found all the added elements, like Jasmine's maid friend etc, very entertaining. I think all the cast memebers did great justice to their roles and found the more subdued Jafar somehow more sinister.