Today’s Disney Live action remake is Beauty and the Beast, the first of the more modern Disney films to get the live action treatment. The original Disney Beauty and the Beast came out in the early 90s, this came out in 2017, only just over 20 years later, both versions are firmly remembered by people, even fondly so in some cases.
In the director’s chair for this one is Bill Condon, who’d recently directed the Breaking Dawn Twilight movies. For balance I should also mention he directed Mr Holmes which I quite liked.
The film had quite a large budget,
sources vary but it could well be as high as $250m, but the big investment paid
off, with another $1bn hit. It seems as though no matter how much folks on the
internet complain about remakes, they go out to see them anyway. We’ll see what
happens when Mulan eventually makes it out to cinema [this joke was written
before Mulan ended up becoming a Disney+ exclusive].
The film was successful critically but it’s been subject to some rather damning deconstruction post-release that this will be a part of.
The original Beauty and the Beast is a classic for a reason and it holds up rather well. The one song you remember from it is really good, the voice acting and the animation is at the high quality of Disney in the 90’s renaissance era.
Onto the remake and oh boy. Perhaps I’d listened to one too many deconstructions, because I went in with expectations astronomically low and found it was ok. It’s got a lot of problems, not surprisingly but it wasn’t as bad as I feared it might be. They stick to the original story about as much as all but the Alice remake have done.
But what they change and add make some alterations to the context of the story that makes it inevitably worse. A simple matter though it may seem, having Cogsworth and Lumiere take Belle to a new room in the Tower means the Beast takes that bit longer to try and be nice to Belle. That he doesn’t tell her himself not to go to the West Wing and then reacts with hostility when she shows up, if immediately regretting it afterwards, is another example of making the Beast seem more hostile than he needs to be.
Part of the story of Beauty and the Beast is both parties having to make steps to accommodate the other and a romance grows slowly from this. Putting the onus on Belle to have to make these steps is not helpful and makes the romance feel forced.
But Belle has issues outside of her relationship with the Beast, in particular all the pointless crap added to her backstory. So, let’s start with the whole washing machine pro-feminist angle. It doesn’t go anywhere, it’s not like her inventiveness serves a purpose, nor do the townsfolk really learn any lesson about valuing women at the end.
And then there’s mother, and you all knew this was coming
And the biggest bit of extraneous crap they added to this film, the book of teleportation, are you f*cking kidding me with this sh*t. It adds nothing, it goes nowhere and the existence of said book creates a whole ton of plot-holes. It all relates to Belle’s mother, and it all should’ve been left on the cutting room floor.
But on the subject of Belle reading being an act of defiance, given the dress code from the opening, I’d place this film in the early to mid-1700’s, and women reading wasn’t discouraged in that era, women’s magazines were published, and here’s the kicker, La Belle et La Bête, the original Beauty and the Beast was originally published in said magazines. Also, I wish the new King of whatever part of France this is the best of luck for the rest of his likely very short life.
OK, so what they did to the Beast, well, not much aside from removing all those nice things he did for Belle and put the onus either on his service or an attempt to one-up her. But there’s a notion that his father abused him in some regard and the servants have been condemned with him for doing nothing about it. Oh, for the love of Christ! He was an absolute monarch; if they intervened, they would have their heads chopped off. It’s honestly better if they’re just victims of circumstance, not everything has to be expanded upon.
Speaking of, we haven’t yet got to our main villain Gaston, who incidentally looks a bit too old for Belle, maybe a casting error there. There’s some indication that he has some kind of weird war-time PTSD which is just bizarre and goes absolutely no-where outside of one scene. But, of course, we can’t talk about Gaston without talking about LeFou.
This was a huge talking point for the movie, that LeFou would be the first out gay character in a Disney film. But the overlords in China don’t like that sort of thing, so all the coding is entirely subtext. Josh Gad plays the part well and he’s decently funny but it’s not like having a character whose name literally translates to ‘the fool’ being gay is exactly progressive. There’s no character he could feasibly be in a relationship with. Gaston is his main point of affection but Gaston’s entire character motivation is marrying Belle, he clearly doesn’t feel the same way. I hope they do better, they have done in television.
All of this and I haven’t gotten onto the singing, and it’s pretty bad across the board, there’s a heavy reliance on auto-tune, which really shows when they’re annunciating long syllables. Emma Watson may certainly look beautiful but her singing talent just isn’t up to scratch, and her acting is average. The Beast has more range but the stiffer, realistic CG approach gives up the character’s expressiveness which lessons the impact of certain realisations.
Beauty and the Beast is an inferior remake, the changes made attempt to add depth but only cause confusion and lessen the impact of other scenes, the additions are all entirely pointless because of their confinement to the base narrative. The acting is generally subpar with a few rather questionable casting choices. That said enough of the base narrative is there for some entertainment value to be found.
Rating 45/100
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