A disappointingly bad remake of an un-remake-able classic

Rating: 4/10 (31 January 2020)

The good:
-Hans Zimmer's score. That was a given. The score is about on par with his score from the original, though I do prefer the original "...To Die For" instead of the new "Stampede." Otherwise, it felt like a really nice remaster of the original score.
-They actually sing The Lion Sleeps Tonight to completion!
-Some scenes (that are almost exactly like the scenes from the original, mind you) are genuinely magnificent to look at and experience.
-Seth Rogen actually makes a pretty good Pumbaa.
-BeyoncÃ© is great, surprisingly.
-For the most part, the visuals are truly remarkable in terms of realism.
-The kid who plays Young Simba plays him eerily similarly to the original child who played Young Simba. It's uncanny.
-Most of the supporting performances are fine.
The Bad:
-Whose idea was it to give Eddie actual lines? I mean, I love Eric Andre, but still!
-The opening scene looks like it's from a video game cutscene (a recent video game, mind you, but still, it has some of the weaker effects in the film, disappointingly).
-Donald Glover as Simba is...eh? I mean, Simba in general is weirdly uninteresting in this movie.
-The cover of Circle of Life is...not great.
The Ugly:
-Wow. The animals have literally no emotion whatsoever. Their faces are just there. They look like animals. Especially Zazu, he by far had the least emotion in the film, and watching his beak simply go up and down when he talks was weird.
-The animations are sometimes not great, which ruins the realism of the visual effects.
-WHO DECIDED TO CHANGE BE PREPARED?! This version of Be Prepared was absolutely awful. The original was better by several orders of magnitude. It's barely even a song, it's mostly just a rhyming speech with music playing in the background. It started to actually get good after a little while, I was finally starting to dig where it was going...AND THEN IT ENDED! It was so bafflingly short. It was embarrassing.
-Chiwetel Ejiofor's Scar was pretty abysmal. I don't blame Ejiofor, but he is absolutely not intimating at all. I do blame him for his delivery of certain lines, though. Where Jeremy Irons delivered them with genuine malice and swagger, Ejiofor just sounds like a whiny child.
-The film completely lacks the soul and the goofiness of the original film. It feels bland and lacking. The slapstick comedy is gone, the animals' emotions are gone, the very likeable villain is gone...it's just empty. Favreau seems to have just taken the visuals and the writing from the original movie and just made it photorealistic, but he forgot to make the rest of the movie, if that makes sense.
Overall, this remake is exactly why Disney needs to stop remaking classic films. Art is timeless. No one goes around painting new versions of the Mona Lisa or Starry Night, or writing new versions of The Lord of the Rings. The same should be the case for films.