No idea how reviews are as good as they are.

Rating: 3/10 (19 March 2017)

*SPOILERS* Let me just say, I came into this movie ready to hate it. The original classic is my second favorite Disney movie ever (Aladdin being the first), and based on my distaste for Cinderella and the cash cow that is Disney trying to milk all the money it can from a popular property annoys the hell out of me. But, as it would happen, I enjoyed myself more than I thought. However, this was a low, LOW bar to clear. Let me start off with the good: Kevin Kline as the father. I thought he did a really good job and I totally bought the relationship between him and Belle. Josh Gad as Lefou. Honestly, he was hilarious in this movie, and the scene in which he's singing in Gaston's tavern brought about a moment I can't spoil here because of it's hilarity. The movie on that note is also very funny, I did find myself laughing ore than once or twice during the film. I also thought the voice acting for the objects was good, especially the man who played Lumiere. The casting, overall, was OK. I could see Emma Watson as Belle, and the guy who played Gaston was fun enough to watch. But now we get into the bad stuff. The singing. For the most part it's pretty good, except for one person, and this is the fatal flaw, and that is Emma Watson as Belle. All throughout the movie you can tell whenever she sang the auto-tune was cranked up to 11, because her voice never sounds human. Honestly, this brought her performance down a lot for me. Then there's the sound design itself. In the beginning, there was a song that was going on, but the background noise was so much that I could barely hear what they were saying, and that continued a lot throughout the entire movie. Then there those CGI effects. Good God on green Earth, I hated how fake everything looked in the movie. In an animated realm, everyone can work off each other. In live action, human actors are there looking at balls of Play-doh or whatever they use to see the effects, and none of them ever looked real or alive. There is an especially weird addition with having the feather duster be a dove(?) And the worst sin of all is the main characters themselves, the Beast and Belle. First of all, to go along with the effects subject, the beast looks terrible. His face looks the weirdest because it looks like the CGI animators tried to give him an almost humanoid face, which DIDN'T work. But first let's talk bout him as a character. When Belle is forced to stay in the castle, he shows sympathy by giving her a nice bedroom and ATTEMPTING to invite her to dinner. However, in this version, you see none of that sympathy. Instead, the objects get her from the dungeon, they provide with a bedroom. Hell, he gets outright furious with Lumiere and Cogsworth for providing her with a room. With all this sympathy taken away from him, it's really hard for me to buy the romance between the Beast and Belle.They also try to delve into a backstory of his, saying he had a cruel father, but the most "delving" they do is just mentioning that he had a cruel father. And then there is Belle. In the original, she's a smart, kind, and loving person. Here, I actually saw her someone of a jerk. When Gaston, who isn't nearly as douchey as he should be in the movie, kindly asks her to dinner, she denies him like some Mean Girls pre-Madonna. She also has almost no life or personality throughout the entire movie. Overall, Beauty and the Beast 2017 was a shameless cash grab with none of the heart or charm of the original movie.