The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid is a good example of what's wrong with Disney these days (at least in my opinion) - besides some casting choices that may rise pro and contra voices (I don't care), this movie is dead like plastic. The songs are stale and uninspired, the special effects department did okay, the actors did okay, but well, the formula of Disney movies is now a walking dead corpse, too many times chewed on. But this is not only a question of modern changes to fit to the taste of zeitgeist but for a long time Disney is like a recycling factory: with every turn of the machine the product gets worse and worse, at least if you don't add something new, fresh and substantial, something creative. So my greatest complain: the music is average, the visuals are average, the story is the typical Disney blabla, the entertaining factor is rather low. A typical movie made from the construction kit branded "Disney". But maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy and my by age weakened eyes and heart cannot see the beauty in this, well, product.

To be honest, the live action remakes have been hit or miss. For every hit like Beauty and the Beast there have been misses like Dumbo. The Little Mermaid remake unfortunately falls in the later category. It fails to recapture the magic of the original. The newly added material is jarring, especially the sing by Aquafina. The CGI is weird...the realistic CGI animals are creepy...the child I was with didn't like them, "the crab is scary". Everything is dark and muted. I don't agree with those complaining about the casting. All of the actors were fine. Some were better than others, especially when comparing it to the original, but nothing was distractingly bad. I just feel it could have been done better.

It's just The Little Mermaid but stripped from everything that made the original animated movie a hit. Unbelievably loaded with cgi which helps prove that some things should be left animated, for example: Sebastian and Flounder looked horrendous and have perhaps the most unoriginal boring character designs I've ever seen, many scenes had such a dark tone that you couldn't even admire the decent looking cgi and it attempted to be as colourful and magical as the original yet failed since (believe it or not) it is live action.

The story was the same with a couple of changes which improved some aspects and also made some parts much worse. Eric had a much more in depth character and even had his own song which was ok which drastically improved his character. However, there were many changes which didn't do anything justice. Ariel had a new song after just losing her voice where she's describing how she feels. Why's this an issue? No reason except from the fact it completely destroys the fact she LOST HER VOICE! I get it's all in her head but why does she need to tell us what she thinks? We could have been left to understand what she is thinking by her actions or facial expressions. But no instead they give her a song after removing her ability to sing? You could have made her play instruments instead if you wanted another musical score since that would have reinforced her musical creativity and her way of exploring the land but I guess that's too creative for modern Disney?

There was a part I thought was pretty great about this movie and that was Ursula. For almost all of her scenes she basically stole the audiences eyes and ears. The actress' performance was great and she was just entertaining to watch from both her lines and physical expressions. Definitely a downgrade from the original but still great nonetheless.

Next is the comedy. I kid you not I had like 2 laughs from this movie and they were both light chuckles. You could tell the writers really wanted to play it safe when it came to the jokes like I guess I found a few more scenes funny but not enough to make me to actually burst out in laughter. This overall just made most of the movie boring and since I've already seen the exact same movie from 30 odd years ago, it felt like I had no other reasons to keep watching.

Also Scuttlebut is probably one of the worst things I've ever heard I honestly have no clue what the writers were thinking when giving Awkwafina a whole song. I'm sure she had fun with it and it's nothing against the actress at all I think she's great but her voice very clearly shouldn't be used for singing especially as the lead singer.

Speaking of the songs, most of them were pretty good (outside of the obvious 2 I have mentioned). Halle Bailey had an amazing singing voice and made every song she sang actually nice to listen to. Kiss The Girl had always been my personal favourite and this movie did it somewhat justice. I still enjoyed it but the visuals weren't as engaging as the original. The singing was still solid and I'm glad Sebastian, Flounder and Scuttle were all singing together. Eric's song was ok nothing much going on visually and the autone sounded much more obvious than other songs for me. Under The Sea wasn't that impressive in my opinion. I was never the biggest fan of that song but I could at least appreciate the style. This version was practically the same but with complete use of cgi which just got uninteresting fast (outside of the dark glowing part). But since it's practically the same song except using a bunch of cgi it's ultimately worse.

So to sum it up, this movie is probably the most average a movie can get. A boring live action remake of an animated movie that was clearly animated for a reason with a couple decent changes, a few bad changes and a few VERY bad changes. If you have seen the original, don't expect much. 5/10 arguably a 4/10 just because it's literally a movie I have already seen so many times before just with less creativity.

I mean it's an okay film. But is that what Disney wants to achieve now? Just to make okay movies? What happened to making great and lasting ones? Is that just a thing of the past?

My biggest qualm with this movie is that the acting performances from the cast was lackluster. These Disney classics are sacred in a sense that they made us emotionally invested in them. It's disappointing to think that animated characters were able to "act" and exhibit more emotional pull more than live actors. The original made us feel for these characters.

This version had no heart in it, it's just the shell of the 1989 classic with an attempt to impress contemporary audiences but it still fell flat on its face.

The scenes in this movie felt rushed and it was just hard to watch all together without thinking they just had a checklist of events they wanted to make sure was there. The dialogue was sub-par. The new rap song was simply unbearable. I had my hands over my ears while it was happening.

The only thing I could compliment about this movie are the visual effects. I liked the feel of the setting. But other than that. It felt more two dimensional than the cartoon.

The cgi in some scenes looks pretty weird, as avatar has elevated the way you record and do cgi underwater. The way they made the animals are so strange it seems that they have no life or emotions, as if it were all superfluous, the way the villain is not afraid, I tried to like it more it's just another live action to get rid of sales and reversals of products, without anything very original and without any kind of Disney charm and magic that we were I'm used to seeing it, anyway the Ericks don't have much charisma and it's just Erick with nothing, at the end of it all it's just another live action to be forgotten in a few months.