Visually fantastic. Emotionally flat.

Rating: 5/10 (29 July 2019)

There are significant pluses to be noted about this film. Visually, it's gorgeous. Renders of the characters and locations are virtually perfect, and it's easy to see why people persist in describing this as a live action remake when it's nothing of the sort. There's a lot to look at here, and for that reason I'm not sorry I saw it.
Animal characters are given the behaviors of the real things without the anthropomorphism of the original film, even if some are geographically misplaced. The decision to make the hyena clan clearly matriarchal was a good one along these lines, and made a secondary line of conflict available which was sadly under-exploited. Another good decision was to much more clearly identify the disaster that overcame the pridelands under the hyenas as ecological due to over-hunting, with the conflict between Mufasa and Scar due in part to Scar's resentment over Mufasa's restraint and dedication to ecological balance.
But there are so many problems. The direction was dull. Much of the time it felt as if they were simply going through the motions rather than presenting the story to stand on its own as dramatically as possible. Many have complained about the characters' expressionlessness. To me that's simply a consequence of choosing to render them realistically and not a bad thing per se. Emotion COULD have instead been conveyed by liberal use of body language, perhaps with a little exaggeration such as a human actor might use for greater audience impact. But this was not done for the most part. Only when they approach the climax do they begin to explore the full range of what they might have done throughout. The voice acting was, with a few notable exceptions, uninspired and often sounded rushed. I put this down to direction more than anything else, since I know what some of these actors are capable of. The decision to retain James Earl Jones for Mufasa was, perhaps, not well thought-out. He's now almost 90 years old, and sounds like it. While still impressive, his voice lacks the overpowering dynamism and range of his prime that made his original portrayal of Mufasa so memorable.
I like some of the new directions of the script, but some of the decisions both large and small made me scratch my head. As noted above, a potentially tense secondary rivalry was hardly brought out. We saw it only at the climax. It's understandable that some of the more cartoonish action of the original was reblocked, but the new version was not always successful and sometimes came across as a lazy shortcut to the next scene. Young Simba was given a tag line "I got this!" meant to show off his brash overconfidence. We don't hear it again after the death of Mufasa, but why should it not return when adult Simba recovers his proper identity? Why was "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" performed in broad daylight?
All in all, a wasted opportunity.