The film pushes celebrity faces rather than good storytelling.

Rating: 5/10 (24 July 2019)

"The Lion King (2019)" Review
(5/10)
It seems the Circle of Life nowadays is being a grown man watching a Disney reboot of a beloved animated film from childhood. We've had three of those this summer alone, and the latest - a remake of one of their greatest - The Lion King is aggressively mediocre in every department except for the visuals. Jon Favreau's aggressively mediocre retelling lacks heart and nuance.
The story remains the same, but if you're only interested in gawping at the visual boundaries a film could push The Lion King will blow your mind because there is absolutely no way to tell where the 'live action' ends and the CGI animation begins. Everything, from a blade of grass to the eyeballs and fur of the lions is 100 percent photorealistic. Director Jon Favreau employs the same hyper realism technique he did in the terrific The Jungle Book, but the results here are far less effective.
Making this film hyper real looking exposes two vital downsides of the original - that it has a simplistic story, and cliché and cringey. The original was such a classic because it hid those downsides with beautiful, colourful animation, sympathetic, emotionally charged faces on the animals, and an extraordinary soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and Elton John to tug at your heartstrings during the emotionally heavy moments. Favreau removes these very elements in the remake, making this a drab looking film bereft of colour, with the animals having no emotional core, and adds atrocious remixes of the classic songs.
Things 'happen' in this film - but they don't carry much weight. Simba's journey is supposed to be transformational and heroic, but the transitions are too quick and lack energy. The message is very much there - that a man shielded by privilege needs to step out and live with the commoners to gain a better perspective on life, and this remake had a golden opportunity to dig deeper into these themes, but the script by Jeff Nathanson makes no such effort. The final fight isn't as exciting and emotional as the original, and the same goes for Mufasa's death.
Disney has retooled some of its classic stories to make them more progressive and nuanced, but we don't see that in this Lion King. The comic relief comes predictably from Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumba (Seth Rogen) but here's the thing about this whole cast - there's no shaking away their personalities which are given a bigger focus that the characters in the story. The film pushes celebrity faces rather than good storytelling. If there's any statement this film makes it is that voice actors need to get back into recording booths - films like these are not going to make less money by giving experts jobs that utilise their expertise.