The Lion King — Review
2019’s ‘The Lion King’ is the rare movie that I dislike not because it’s bad but simply because it’s so very, very redundant. And yes, I’m well aware that Disney’s been on this particular resale bender since Tim Burton’s 3D 90s-screen-saver-looking ‘Alice in Wonderland’ retelling somehow made a billion dollars at the box office. Yet as with that one and the others so far you can at least imagine what the producers’ pitches are when they’re forced to talk in interviews about these movies for how these are updated, more mature versions of the stories we love, which can settle down in the 21st century more comfortably. You know, as in “well nowadays we treat animals better, or we don’t hate women as much, or have you ever noticed everything in 2019 is bit less colonial…”
I’m not really sure what anyone could say for the new ‘Lion King’ except “shut the hell up and just look at these special effects, baby!” I made a joke on Facebook last year comparing the trailer to Gus Van Sant’s infamous (nearly) shot-for-shot ‘Psycho’ remake, but I think in my head I still believed that the guy who’d just made a surprisingly delightful ‘Jungle Book’ movie was all but guaranteed a victory lap with a property as beloved as ‘The Lion King.’ Now I feel John Favreau’s ‘Lion King’ can fit right next to Van Sant’s ‘Psycho’ as kind of boring, kind of fascinating examples of how to do something the exact same way, changing just enough so that you lose the magic.
Was Vince Vaughn totally miscast as Norman Bates in that 1998 Hitchcock retread? Sure, but it’s still hard to put your figure on much of why that movie doesn’t work. The stars of the ‘Lion King’ released this weekend look like real animals, and while that is pretty cool for a bit, one can’t help but remember that back in ’94 they looked like characters (or as Norma Desmond might have put it, “they had faces!”). The new movie adds an extra Beyoncé song (it’s pretty forgettable) and a few original jokes as new material, and other than that it’s the exact same movie you saw in theaters 25 years ago and/or grew up watching on VHS. And I tell ya it’s damn hard to judge a piece of entertainment in which you struggle to imagine what creative choices were actually made.
2019 may go down as the year in which I decide that more than endless superhero flicks, TV reboots or unwarranted stabs at the next big cinematic universe (what’s up, Dark Universe?) what I’m really sick of is these Disney remakes. This year’s ‘Dumbo’ and ‘Aladdin’ were bad, and I will remember them for all of their dumb badness. This ‘Lion King’ has already begun to disintegrate from my memory (kind of like the face of a person you met one time, but they look a lot like someone you know well) slipping justly behind the legacy of its predecessor.
