A Technical Marvel Lacking Depth, Discovery and Awe of the Original.

Rating: 5/10 (26 July 2019)

Here it is: The Lion King (2019) and it's the EXACT same movie we got 25 years ago, only this time... less energy and not-so vivid imagery from Iron Man's Jon Favreau himself? Yeah; for all the box office records this film seems to be breaking it shows that Disney's critic-proof with the 'right' films, but it's not a good sign for creatively bankrupt films like these: shallow remakes that forget what made the original so memorable and think that repeating EVERY story beta will make the film any more or less different to how it was before.
This take on The Lion King suffers many of the same problems as the Ghostbusters reboot: its a cliff-notes abbreviation of the stuff that worked before with little to no variety in the narrative changes; and for the changes that ARE there, they aren't terribly strong on their own as narrative devices. There are nice touches here and there: the extra animals surrounding Timon and Pumbaa were nice and varied but the main characters are supposed to be THE main attraction. This film shows Simba struggling to make his whole redemption arc convincing and not phoned-in from the original's screenplay, and the voice acting: it was one of the most middling voices for me. You know the dialogue but the delivery of such key plot points in this movie are under-developed that it's not even bad under-playing of the lines.
What did I like about this movie? The music's still AWESOME, the animation is top-notch stuff even if it doesn't fit the vivid, larger than life 'Broadway Style musical animated feature' aesthetic, and Seth Rogen as Pumbaa was a nice change from the original.
The Lion King: it's a spectacle that's too beholden to the original movie to say anything different at all. The story's the literal same as the original, but the animation and music help spice things up for the viewers uninitiated in this kind of drama.
This remake gets 2.5/5 stars. Nice imagery can't cover-up the creative emptiness present here.