The corporate version of Beauty And The Beast: Disney at it's most generic and dull

Rating: 4/10 (3 March 2017)

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: where should I start folks. I had low expectations already because I hated each and every single trailer so far, but boy did Disney make a blunder here. I'm sure the film will still make a billion dollars - hey: if Transformers 11 can do it, why not Belle? - but this film kills every subtle beautiful little thing that had made the original special, and it does so already in the very early stages. It's like the dinosaur stampede scene in Jackson's King Kong: only with even worse CGI (and, well, kitchen devices instead of dinos).
The worst sin, though, is that everything (and I mean really EVERYTHING) looks fake. What's the point of making a live-action version of a beloved cartoon if you make every prop look like a prop? I know it's a fairy tale for kids, but even Belle's village looks like it had only recently been put there by a subpar production designer trying to copy the images from the cartoon. There is not a hint of authenticity here. Unlike in Jungle Book, where we got great looking CGI, this really is the by-the-numbers version and corporate filmmaking at its worst. Of course it's not really a "bad" film; those 200 million blockbusters rarely are (this isn't 'The Room' after all), but it's so infuriatingly generic and dull - and it didn't have to be. In the hands of a great director the potential for this film would have been huge.
Oh and one more thing: bad CGI wolves (who actually look even worse than the ones in Twilight) is one thing, and the kids probably won't care. But making one of the two lead characters - Beast - look equally bad is simply unforgivably stupid. No wonder Emma Watson seems to phone it in: she apparently had to act against an guy with a green-screen in the place where his face should have been.