The Reviews For “The Lion King” Are Looking Grim

July 12, 2019 / Posted by:

Disney had one job to do with their not actually live-action remake of The Lion King and that’s to make sure, at the very least, that everyone watching it felt the love that night. Well, the reviews are in and critics are reporting that not only did they not feel the love, they didn’t feel much of anything. AV Club’s A.A. Dowd called it “Joyless, artless, and maybe soulless” while IndieWire’s David Erlich said it looked like “the world’s longest and least convincing deepfake”. Sounds like the only love to be found in TLK 2019 is sandwiched in between the G and the R in Simba’s voice daddy Donald Glover’s name. I hate to say I told you so (who am I kidding, I love to say  I told you so), but I told you so, Disney!

According to Variety:

As of writing, the film holds a rotten score of 57% on Rotten Tomatoes, far below the 93% of the original. Common complaints are the photorealism of the Jon Favreau’s “live-action” adaptation: Where critics adored the anthropomorphic singing cartoons of the original, they felt the nature documentary look drove a wedge between viewers and the beloved characters.

As Variety notes, most of the criticism is directed at the disconnect between the hyper-realistic CGI and the hyper-fidelity to the original animation. It made people hyper-un-hype. Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri praised the animation saying it “possesses all the immersive detail and tactile immediacy of an unusually good nature documentary” but was unnerved when David Attenborough’s Planet Earth morphed into Ken Burns’ The War. (via Variety)

Suddenly, that iconic opening scene, with all the animals gathering to bow before the newborn lion cub Simba, held up like some sort of scepter of absolute power, doesn’t feel triumphant or moving, as it did in its fantastical, animated setting. It feels queasily authoritarian.

And here I always thought Scar was the one who was supposed to the Hitler. It goes, Scar is Hitler, Mufasa is Aslan/Jesus, Simba is Hamlet, Nala is Sloane Peterson, and Timon and Pumbaa are Lenny and Squiggy. I thought this was canon!

And as I said before, the bare minimum Disney needed to do was get the damn song right. And they couldn’t even do that properly.

Oh well. Disney’s still going to get all its coins, and the new soundtrack will probably go triple platinum. The wait and ultimate let down of TLK 2019 took 3 years from announcement to premiere. And now we have to do it all over again for The Little Mermaid. It’s a lesson to us all to set our expectations accordingly.

Pic: Disney via YouTube

Tags: , ,
SHARE
Our commenting rules: Don't be racist or bigoted, or post comments like "Who cares?", or have multiple accounts, or repost a comment that was deleted by a mod, or post NSFW pics/videos/GIFs, or go off topic when not in an Open Post, or post paparazzi/event/red carpet pics from photo agencies due to copyright infringement issues. Also, promoting adblockers, your website, or your forum is not allowed. Breaking a rule may result in your Disqus account getting permanently or temporarily banned. New commenters must go through a period of pre-moderation. And some posts may be pre-moderated so it could take a minute for your comment to appear if it's approved. If you have a question or an issue with comments, email: [email protected]

src="https://c.statcounter.com/922697/0/f674ac4a/1/"
alt="drupal analytics" >