#ok since the people were asking here's my full thoughts on this frankensteinian nightmare of an IP recapture | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

metanarrates · 10 months

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talk more about little mermaid 2023

bad movie! but since when is that news to anyone

here is a short list of things I liked:

-shockingly, the actors playing prince eric and ariel had pretty decent chemistry! i thought their scenes together were somewhat cute. they were certainly the only actors in it who seemed like they were trying to give their all, except for maybe a few minor largely unnamed side characters. nothing special, but in a soulless CGI cash grab poorly disguised as a "live-action" work, having a handful of vaguely pleasant scenes was better than nothing.

-also shockingly, I did somewhat like most of the scenes the movie added from the original. rather than being a straight-up adaptation, they added a number of scenes to either flesh out eric's character, flesh out the romance, or to further explore ariel's experience on land. they weren't all great scenes, and were basically the equivalent of polishing up plastic, but some of them worked fine at a mechanical level, and at least it shows that a little bit of effort was made? although a number of creative choices were clearly to Ward Off Discourse. we will discuss this.

-uh. i thought the costumes were okay. there was an attempt

ok that's it for good shit the movie did. here's the stuff i did not enjoy:

-BAD cgi. like APPALLINGLY bad. I'm by no means a visual effects expert but the way the actors were integrated into underwater environments was horrible. they didn't look like they belonged there, their movements were too floaty even for underwater, and the way their hair was animated to float looked distracting and unnatural. additionally, the "camera" was set up frequently in action scenes to not capture a lot of the action, seemingly because the movements were difficult to capture well in CGI. a lot of the time in the CGI environments, the lighting would be distractingly weird and make the whole environment look even more fake than usual. the color palettes didn't feel like they always had a lot of thought into them, which also led to weird lighting and visual problems, and it never felt like the CGI animals had much weight. speaking of which...

-WHY DID THEY MAKE THE FUNNY ANIMALS WHO SING AND DANCE LOOK LIKE REGULAR CRABS AND FISH AND WHATNOT

-NO SERIOUSLY IF YOU'RE TRYING TO PAINT-BY-NUMBERS RECAPTURE THE WHIMSY IN THE ORIGINAL? GOING FOR "REALISM" IN ANIMALS THAT DON'T PARTICULARLY EMOTE IS A HORRIBLE CHOICE

-halle bailey seems to be a perfectly fine actress, based on what i've seen of her. it didn't seem like the director wanted her to facially emote hardly at all ever. she mainly goes for the wide-eyed vaguely pleasant disney princess expression the whole film, and it makes her performance feel horribly strained. im not expecting a disney film to have stellar acting - its a movie targeted to kids and millenials with nostalgia - but it kind of sucked to watch because there were a few moments where she DID emote more and it felt like she was doing pretty well in those moments! it felt to me like, rather than a lack of ability, she was simply hamstrung by those directing her :(

-awkwafina rap written by lin-manuel miranda.

-on that note, none of the new songs were very good. they also changed under the sea to not be an ensemble piece? look, im not the biggest fan of the original film, but having the fun colorful song where lots of fish and whatever sing all together change into a sebastian solo act with ariel support is... a weird choice. it does kind of feel like the whimsy has, in general, been sucked out of this film at times.

-outside of a few side characters, nobody seemed like they wanted to be there besides the leads. the deliveries were awkward and strained. king triton ESPECAILLY seemed like he did not want to be there. sir was there a gun held to your head here

-perhaps the biggest sin of all, but ursula did NOT serve cunt. half the fun of watching the original movie is how over-the-top she is as a performer, and here the actress is just Not giving it. her vocalization sounds really oddly strained at times? ma'am is there also a gun held to your head

there's a certain structural ethos applied to this movie. I alluded to it earlier with the comment about warding off discourse, but probably a better way to word it would be "trying to retroactively defend the original film, and try to make parts of it more 'up-to-date' when thet's not possible." a sort of repolishing and image-update of the Little Mermaid brand, if you will.

obviously, remakes have frequently done this in the past. I would argue that is often the point of a remake: a way to make the IP still viable in the modern day as a source of income to the company. but it felt very transparent here. the little mermaid has often been criticized for being an insta-romance where ariel's only dream is to marry a random guy? here's several more scenes with eric and ariel to establish their chemistry. people have discussed some of ursula's lines in "poor unfortunate souls" as being objectifying? we're cutting them. and hey, let's just show everyone that the little mermaid is now a diverse story that values women. let's cast a black lead actress and have several side characters be woc, including a new character who is eric's mother.

to be clear, I don't think these changes are bad, in and of themself. it's nice that these actresses of color were cast! the changes made to the plot were kind of fun! but all of these changes are only in service of trying to squeeze even more money out of an existing cash cow. it's very obviously an image and marketing thing, rather than people feeling passionate about retelling an existing story. and really, there's only so far you can go with a story originally only showing white people and written in 1989. all you can do is polish. there are no broader, structural changes you can make to it, because all that would do is turn it into a different story. and of course disney is never GONNA tell a different story, made by and about black women, because there's not a cash cow in that. in the hands of a megacorporation, diversity is only going to be a token gesture to accumulate more profit.

it's a disney remake. at the end of the day, there's not too much point in thinking too hard about it. I watched it for a laugh with my good friend, basically. but I'm still interested in it as a gateway into the decision-making process of the disney board of directors and stakeholders. i've seen some of the other disney remakes, since my mom and younger siblings do like watching them and this one in particular strikes me for how little care was put into it. I'm wondering how well it did at the box office, because this really does feel like we're reaching the final possible end for these remakes. they're not making very many cultural waves. it seems like nobody likes them. but clearly, the disney board is hoping for them to be a perfectly marketable recapturing of whatever the existing IP had. who knows how many remakes the studio has left in them?

whatever. the late-stage capitalist megacorporation media landscape continues to be a depressing slog. I'd recommend going and finding something actually good to watch lmao

#narrates #ok since the people were asking here's my full thoughts on this frankensteinian nightmare of an IP recapture #it almost feels like this isn't worth criticism? like this is just a low effort ad pooped out by a megacorp that has obviously given up #certainly not worth any discourse. lol #but there's some revealing stuff in it about the disney decision making process and I did want to discuss that #in the future though I'm probably not gonna like... ever watch a disney movie unless I'm dragged to it by my younger siblings lol

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