Be Prepared...

Rating: 10/10 (20 July 2019)

...to be dazzled with mirrored material from the original Disney 1994 classic. After much excitement of wanting to see this movie, I finally watched it the day it hit the cinemas & as soon as the movie started I was blown away by the CGI effect - amazing! The way the film starts (the opening scene of all the animals coming together during "Circle Of Life") was just exactly the same as the original. Plus the script is the same as well.
We all have our disappointments & I'm going to try and concrete what may stand out to you the most as it did me:
Don't expect Scar to look and especially sound any similar to the one of the original movie because he doesn't. Jeremy Irons really nailed his performance and terrified me to hell in 1994 but here we are in 2019 and we're given the voice talent of Chiwetel Ejiofor, who, in my opinion sounds a little wooden, and could have given much more to playing Scar.
Plus his signature song "Be Prepared" was way much darker in the original. Here it seemed shorter and a lot more plain. Where was the infamous line "You won't get a sniff without me!!!" They cut it!!!
The hyenas were especially more effective & funnier in the original but I guess we can expect that from Whoopi Goldberg because she was incredible in 1994. Such an awesome addition to the original movie. But I guess 2019 is all about featuring voice talents of unknown actors.
I also have to agree with another user review who mentioned the very similar look to Adult Nala & Sarabi, yes they looked the same. You couldn't tell them apart.
I'm not a fan of Beyoncé so I can't really say how thrilled I was when I saw she joined the cast of this movie. I'm sure she's a great singer but nothing special in my eyes.
The soundtrack could've given a lot more too, a lot of the original hits were there and it's nice to see Elton John back contributing to this but again, the 1994 classic gave a lot more to us than 2019's version.
There's a nice little added extras here as well in regards to the script. As much as they've kept to the original, there's a few extra surprises thrown in, especially with Timon & Pumbaa.
Mufasa's death - I'm going to try not to spoil anything here but I will say it all seems to happen a lot faster than the original classic. But then I thought the whole movie seemed to be a lot quicker than the original. The suspense wasn't as good. Before I came to the cinema, did I tell myself repeatedly "I'm going to cry!" Yes. But I did I cry? No! I think I was a little let down with how fast the movie moved, Scar's reactions again were too plain and showed very little emotion in his voice especially when digging those claws into Mufasa before sending him to his death.
All in all I will say it's a great movie and you can't argue the fact that the CGI is just mind blowing. It's like watching real life lions in Africa. Really impressive. 110% effort there!
Be prepared to be taken back 25 years with very much originality plus a lot more additional creativity.