A waste

Rating: 5/10 (9 April 2017)

Despite the great amount of work that went into this remake, I am having a hard time seeing as anything but a cash grab. The story really lent itself better as a cartoon. It's a story wants to be friendly and light-hearted with talking furniture characters that seem more like people than actual furniture. It seemed like attempts were made to give it the same endearing qualities as the cartoon like the Be Our Guest number and the playful furniture characters, but these did not blend well with the dark color scheme, making the castle in complete disrepair and in a perpetual winter, and other attempts at heightened drama.
There are a number of reasons for re-making a movie, but I really don't think this one was warranted. The primary issue with re-making this particular Disney classic is that the original movie was pretty good. I do not get the sense that any Disney fans wanted to see a live-action reboot, and the cartoon only came out about 25 years ago and does not feel like an old movie yet. Also, there was nothing terribly new that was brought to the story. There were a couple new elements, namely a subplot involving Belle finding out how her mother died and the notion that the majority of the village is gullible and unintelligent, but none of these things contributed in any way to the larger story. On the whole it was the same movie done in CGI and green screen sets instead of cartoon.
In a theme and plot sense it was quite clunky. The cutting between the different plot lines and characters did not feel well-timed to me, and perhaps if I cared to look back at the exact sequence of the movie I would know why. The main thematic point of the movie seemed to be missed a bit. What makes Beauty and the Beast a "tale as old as time" is that it's the story of one person bringing out the kindness in another and proving that anyone can rise above their external ugliness with inner goodness. The scenes in which Belle and the Beast grow closer to each other were, in my opinion, the best in the movie; but I feel like there should have been one or two more of them so that their relationship was stronger by the time they had to part ways. Having a bunch of the villagers be connected to the servants of the castle was just another forced and unnecessary element to cap it off.
I was not at all impressed with the distribution of acting talent. None of the actors did a bad job, but lower-caliber actors could have delivered equally good performances. In that light, hiring such a star-studded cast seems like it was just a way to get more money. However, I must say that Luke Evans and Josh Gad made a good Gaston and LeFou duo. This was diminished to a degree by nearly everything that LeFou did or said point not so subtly to his being gay. Having a Disney movie feature a gay character is fine at face value, but I don't think they pulled it off well here.
Overall, I cannot recommend seeing this. There is nothing here that is better than the original cartoon, even in a visual sense. I went to see it because I was curious to see how Disney would reinterpret a classic story, but there was not much to see. If this is how the upcoming line of Disney re-makes are going to be, I will not bother seeing them because the people in charge of the story do not seem to care about making a quality movie. Overall Rating: 6.2/10