The Lion King review

Rating: 9/10 (4 February 2020)

Well, I have to hand it to this movie's marketing team. Everything we got in trailers and promotions perfectly encapsulated Jon Favreau's "reimagining" of one of the most acclaimed and successful animated films of all time. None of the characters in the trailers showed any tinge of emotion on their faces, and all of the clips were from scenes directly lifted from the original. That's what we were shown, and that's what 2019's The Lion King is. So it's really on us for giving it money and sitting in that theater for two hours. We're giving Disney our energy, and they've caught on that they don't need to deliver much on the product when we do.
So, as exemplified by their latest "reimagining," "new take," "reworking," whatever they want to call it to avoid the largely negative connotations that come with "remake," they simply aren't trying.
The computer animation in Favreau's Lion King is impressive on a technical level, but it has no life or personality to it. Of course it's not really "live-action" like some have called it for simplicity's sake, but it's as close as they could get with a story like this. Here's the thing, though: the medium can't work for this story. True stylized animation was always the best fit for it, and it's a large part of what gave the original its sense of wonder and grandeur. So it doesn't translate into photorealistic imagery to begin with, but even the new form of animation is done to a subpar level. The designs, movement, and environments all look real, but that's not strictly what people want to see in a Disney film. The characters rarely, if ever, visibly react to even the most tragic events, and it makes it hard to care even if we've connected to this story through the 1994 film. Sarabi doesn't look sad at all when she learns her mate has died and her son is presumed dead, nor does she even have any visual distinction from the other lionesses. That includes Nala, whose role is slightly expanded in this version, but not in a way that actually feels bigger than her role in the animated film. BeyoncÃ© gives a good performance, as do most of the voice actors (Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen are laugh-out-loud hilarious at times, though not enough to make the movie feel like it has a personality), but the star power feels wasted on such dull designs. You can tell there's emotion behind the microphone, but none of it comes across visually, and unfortunately for this movie, it's a visual medium.
Sequences like "Circle of Life," "I Just Can't Wait to Be King," and Mufasa's famous appearance from beyond the grave, all of which were visually distinct and even stunning in the original, are devoid of their predecessors' energy, color, and creativity. The latter especially. I won't say specifically what they do with the scene, which is perhaps one of the most iconic in Disney history, but it might be one of the biggest disservices any of these Disney remakes have done to their source material, and it presents an astounding lack of effort. And this is in a huge production from one of the biggest behemoths in the industry. I don't know how they could screw it up so badly with such advanced technology and a budget of $260 million, but it's a gargantuan letdown.
The movie puts so little effort into basic setup and payoff that it feels condescending, like Jon Favreau and Jeff Nathanson are directly looking through the camera at the audience and saying, "We know you're only seeing this because you love the original, so we're not going to bother making it worthwhile." Major themes and emblems of the 1994 film are pulled out suddenly in the third act for the sake of resembling something beloved, without being properly built up at any other point in the movie. Nathanson's script adds a few lines of backstory for Scar and the hyenas, but it doesn't feel like it truly adds anything to the original story, nor does it make this one make any more sense. Plot points lifted from the 1994 script by Irene Mecchi, Linda Woolverton, and Jonathan Roberts are awkwardly executed or rushed simply so the crew behind the remake can say they kept them, including Simba's entire character arc and romance with Nala, and Scar's plot to kill Mufasa and take over the pride. Sometimes it feels jarring, other times it drudges along, and others it just gets confusing. Some lines of dialogue lifted from the original script are rearranged and worked around unnecessary pauses, making their respective scenes feel stilted. And once again, the utter lack of emotion on the characters in literally any given scene doesn't help.
The Lion King may not be quite as bad as Guy Ritchie's Aladdin or Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, but pretty much everything good about it (the overall plot, the music, James Earl Jones) was taken from the original, so it can't even claim credit for any of it. It's awkwardly paced, blandly edited, visually dull in every aspect, and does nothing narratively to justify its existence. It may not technically be a shot-for-shot remake like some were speculating from the trailers, but there's nothing different in it that makes it worth the time. Make no mistake: it's the movie you love with all of its emotion and imagination stripped away. That's what the Disney remakes have been doing more and more in the past few years. Maybe they were hit and miss once, but now we're steadily seeing less and less effort put into them, and that's in large part because we continue to see them. And if they already have our money before these movies are released, why even bother to give us what we paid for?