Skip to main content

REVIEW: Mufasa - The Lion King

    To get to the point, Disney's new origin story for The Lion King's Mufasa fails at the ultimate directive of all prequels. By the end of the adventure, you don't actually feel like you know these guys any better. 
    
    Such has been the curse for nearly Disney's live-action spin-offs/remakes of the 2010s on. Disney supposes it's enough to learn more facts or anecdotes about your favorite characters, but the interview has always been more intricate than all that. There is no catharsis nor identification for the audience during Mufasa's culminating moment of uniting the animals of The Pridelands because the momentum pushing us here has been carried by cliche, not archetype. 

    Director Barry Jenkins' not-so-secret weapon has always been his ability to derive pathos from lyrical imagery, and he does great things with the African landscape without stepping into literal fantasy. This is much more aesthetically interesting than the dust bin of the 2019 remake while still appearing visually consistent with that film.

   The film tries to reflect that majesty in the dialogue, but his royal highness keeps tripping over his own cape, tossing in all sorts of verbosities about "destiny" and "the place beyond the horizon" when it is not wanted. Perhaps to add variety, the script also tries to channel snappy exchanges from your nephew's favorite Saturday morning cartoon. ("I just saved our lives" *bad guy pops out of water* "You were saying?"). 

    And for extra measure, the movie pads itself by incessantly flashing back (well, flashing forward) to the frame narrative of Timon, Pumbaa, and Kiara (Simba and Nala's daughter) listening to Rafiki recount the story while Timon and Pumbaa hork out some more of that self-aware commentary that Disney enthusiasts have absolutely been asking for ... I tried keeping track of how often we snapped back to the present time, but I lost count around five--and this was before Mufasa had even met up with Rafiki.

    Congratulations, Disney, you did with metatextuality what hand-drawn animation could not do with flatulence: you actually made Timon and Pumbaa annoying.

    Honestly, I'm not convinced that (ignore the commercial viability for a moment) this movie wouldn't have been better without dialogue. Drop the self-important banter, the endless exposition, the entry-level treatise on monarchy and xenophobia, and just watch these beasts travail the landscape. Go watch Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Bear and tell me it couldn't have worked.

    Jenkins isn't the only one living below his potential either. Miranda's musical style is recognizable here, but it's an empty package, the music always cutting off just as you realize you haven't learned anything new about the characters or the situation over the last 2-3 minutes. 

    Sincerely, thank you for trying, Mr. Jenkins. Now we can say for certain that not even a master director can rescue a story so resigned to mediocrity. 

        --The Professor 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

REVIEW: Superman

      I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters.      The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention.      And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later.  I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture.     I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: ELIO

    Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.      There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.      The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?      But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Resurrecting Treasure Planet

   Wherever any given cinephile falls on the totem pole, they are certainly familiar with the idea of the film canon, this idea of an elect selection of films that signal the height of the artform's cultural value, touchstones for all who consider themselves good and true lovers of cinema. Films that belong to "the canon" are secure in continued cultural relevance even decades after their premiere.    Any person's chosen reference for the canon will certainly vary between which list they believe carries the most authority (AFI Top 100, IMDb Top 250, The Academy Awards), or just as likely will synthesize a number of sources, but however any one person defines it, the canon is real, and it demands to be recognized.            It will surprise some, baffle others, and offend others still, to think that  Walt Disney Animation has its own film canon of sorts. Belonging to this selective society come with some very specific be...

REVIEW: SCREAM VI

       Ever since Sidney Prescott asked audiences nearly 30 years ago "how do you gut someone?" with such disgust, the "Scream" franchise has forced a stab-hungry audience to question how they could ever entertain a ritual so violating as the gruesome act taking someone else's life.  Last year, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett delivered arguably the franchise's strongest offering yet. Strong because the film played its game very well. These guys also know that subversion in film is fun, certainly, but also that films which sell themselves on their subversion tend to be very hollow. You need a strong thematic lifeblood and a cast of characters to root for. If your audience is more excited about the cut-up bodies than the victors, you have a problem. This is where the newer films, including this most outing, have found their strength. Scream VI sees the survivors of the last installment making a fresh break in New York City. Sam, Tara, Mindy, and Chad a...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 2

    As we discussed in the last section , Disney Princesses are often held accountable for things that did not actually happen in their films--things they did not do. I feel like a part of this is the means by which said scrutiny typically takes place.       There is, after all, a sort of stigma around watching "cartoons" as an adult, especially "princess cartoons," let alone watching them intently. And so I feel like a lot of the conclusions people come to about Disney Princesses comes either entirely from second-hand sources, like the memes, or from having it on in the background while babysitting as they scroll through their phone.      I'll use an anecdote from my own history as an example: my very first week of film school, the professor drifted to the topic of female representation in the media. This professor dropped a sort of humble-brag that he had actually never seen Disney's Pocahontas , but that he didn't consider this a terrible ...

The Many Fathers of Harry Potter

     Despite being a Harry Potter fan for most of my life, I didn’t make it to "Harry Potter Land" at Universal until November of 2019.      Some relatives invited me on a SoCal theme park tour, a trip which also saw my last visit to Disneyland before the shutdown. And when you and a bunch of other twenty-somethings are walking through a recreation of Hogwarts for the first time, you inevitably start playing this game where you call out every artifact on display and try to trace it back to whatever movie or even specific moment the mise en scene is trying to invoke:           There’s the greenhouse from "Chamber of Secrets." Now they’re playing the “Secrets of the Castle” track from "Prisoner of Azkaban." Here we are loading in the Room of Requirement from "Order of the Phoenix." From start to finish, the attraction, like the franchise from which it spawned, is just one giant nostalgia parade.     See, t he Wiza...

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Rebirth

     I had a mixed reaction to  Jurassic World: Rebirth,  but it did make for one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had in recent memory.      I have to imagine that a part of this is because my most common theater appointments are matinee screenings, but I had the opportunity to see this one at a fairly well-attended midnight screening. And there's nary a film more tailored for surround-sound roaring and screens wide enough to contain these de-extinct creatures. ("Objects on the screen feel closer than they appear.") It was natural for me to cap the experience by applauding as the credits stared to roll, even if, as usual, I was the only one in the auditorium to do so.     Yes, I am that kind of moviegoer; yes, I enjoyed the experience that much, and I imagine I will revisit it across time.      That's not to imagine the movie is beyond reproach, but for I suppose it bears mentioning that, generally , th...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it.       Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.    So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 5 Films I Missed in 2020

                  Given the peculiar nature of this year’s run of movies, neither a traditional “Best Films of 2020” nor a traditional “Most Anticipated Films of 2021” feel appropriate. Instead, I’m going to do something in between: A spotlight of movies that I was looking forward to in 2020 that have now been bumped into a 2021 release date. There are other films set to release in 2021 that I have on my radar (most of them simply premiering later in 2021 than originally planed), but here are five films that I missed this year in 2020. This installment of Professor’s Picks is partway between a memorial and a forecast. Weep with me, celebrate with me, whichever jives with your inner truth. Anyways . . . five movies long eager to graduate from my list of anticipated movies.   1. A Quiet Place: Part II March 20, 2020   April 23, 2021   September 17, 2021  May 28, 2021 Admittedly,...

REVIEW: DUNE

  It's the dearest hope of many a book lover to see their favorite novel adapted onto the big screen with heavy detail, and this appears to be the mindset by which director Denis Villeneuve adapted Frank Herbert's book, Dune. The end result is a film that is somehow stuffed with detail yet lacking in identity.  The movie favors the initiated viewer, one already familiar with the book. This is bad luck for those unfamiliar with the faith. The film is not merciful to those who cannot keep up with the extensive worldbuilding. The film's action and adventure scenes leak in toward the back half of the film, so much of the movie is carried by politics and world mechanics that the film never satisfactorily explains. (It can't be because the movie was in a rush.) I'm grateful the characters were courteous enough to not speak in exposition, but I was also annoyed that everyone seemed to know more about what was going on than I did.  Various plot elements pop into the story l...