Ultimately Confusing

Rating: 5/10 (25 February 2015)

Disney's Hercules is a curious movie that seeks to entertain but instead managed to provoke a lot of questions. I watched the movie on Netflix one night with my 6 and 12 year old sons, and got a reaction that was pretty typical for them with Disney movies--my 6 year old was scared of the violence and had to leave, and my 12 year old thought it was moderately entertaining. I was intrigued because the movie has gotten a lot of bad press for butchering the myths, but I got to wondering whether this had any effect on how you would judge the movie. Based on a lot of the online reviews I read, the answer seemed to be "no", but enough people were offended that it got me thinking. What is the real effect of this infidelity on how we should judge the movie?
In the end, I concluded that the lack of faithfulness to the myths is a serious problem, but not for the reasons that everyone is raising. Most of the objectors are doing so out of a love of the myths--they appreciate the original stories, and believe Disney has no right to mess with them.
On the other hand, I think the problem is more subtle. The fact is that Disney movies generally follow a formula, are targeted at a specific age, and perform a sort of cultural work that is very consistent. Specifically, they are made for late elementary or middle-schoolers (note that my 6-year-old was afraid) and they basically are designed to instruct the age in certain moral lessons that are necessary for a child's development. The lessons are generally the power of love, friendship, self-sacrifice, hard work, etc.
Now, the problem with Disney's Hercules is not that it does not do this effectively; in fact, it has the usual menu of good animation, good songs, morally aligned characters, etc. The problem is that the original myth is actually rather potent in our culture, and a kids' movie based on Hercules is simply disconcerting. The original Hercules is a character that murdered his family (wife and kids!) and performed labors to atone for his sins. His family was dysfunctional and his step-mom hated him and tried to do him in. He came into existence because his dad, the king of the Gods, was philandering. We know these facts too well--that fact makes this movie just too weird to really conceive of.
And yet, here it is, with Hercules transformed into Superman or Beaver Cleaver or whatever. If you are the type who can successfully ignore all of this context, you might be able to watch this movie and enjoy the Gospel-Motown soundtrack. Maybe you can enjoy it like you might take in an episode of the Twilight Zone. I think, however, this was not the producers' intention.