Hot take the live-action Lion King is Disney's worst movie

From a previous post -

25 years ago, my parents took me to see the original. Now, I took my own son to see the remake. Circle of life, indeed. On one hand, its technical accomplishments are wondrous; The various animals and locations look impossibly real. The issue with remakes is wanting to honor the original and also carve out your own path. This is something Peter Jackson's King Kong was able to do. Here, Jon Favreau's live action remake is faithful to a fault. Seeing the opening, with the animals making their way to Pride Rock, but now in live action nearly had me in tears as how beautiful it was. But any emotions we're feeling are owed to our memories of the original and nothing this remake does on its own. Similarly, Mufasa's death is still powerful (right down to the zoom out on Simba yelling "Noooo!") but again relying largely on the sense of nostalgia from the original. Despite being at least 30 minutes longer than the original, it never felt that way. I was trying to think what was added to beef up the running time as this remake went as exactly as I expected in terms of story - Simba leaves > chills with Timon and Seth Rogen > Simba comes back to kill not Jeremy Irons. Still, I'd give it a 7/10. Worth seeing at least once.

It was okay. The visuals do look stunning. But I agree it does lack the emotion of the original and making it scene-for-scene didn’t make it much better. At least it doesn’t completely butcher the source material like Maleficent does.

Then we achieved equilibrium.

THE LION KING

10/10


THE LION KING PART II: SIMBA'S PRIDE

6/10


Why do people think popular sidekicks can be good protagonists? If they became popular as sidekicks it's for a reason. THE LION KING PART 1 1/2 is proof of that. It re-tells THE LION KING from TIMON the meerkat & PUMBAA the warthog's perspective and it relies too much on references (direct and indirect) to that movie, as if the 2 characters couldn't carry a movie by themselves. And in case you're thinking about it, they can't carry a TV show either. If they could, why did the series TIMON & PUMBAA placed them in specific locations and time periods (something the movies tried to avoid) and turned their cartoon physics into old-fashioned surreal slapstick (the movies' physics were more grounded in reality)? Anyway, here, the voice acting isn't bad and the animation is good for a direct-to-DVD sequel, but the comedy doesn't work and the recreated scenes are full of contradictions. This is a movie-within-a-movie that the duo are watching. Their narration indicates whenever there's a time jump, which is helpful during the montages, but not during regular scenes. The parallel events from the 1st installment are obvious enough for the audience to realize at what point in the timeline something's happening. Actually, the first 3 minutes or so (where they explain that we're about to watch a prequel/midquel) are completely unnecessary. Also, it's annoying to see them pause the movie to say irrelevant things.

1/10


THE LION KING 2019

3/10
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You can read comments of other movies in my blog.

I haven't seen any of these remakes, and I love most of the old live action Disney films from the '50s to '70s, but Cat From Outer Space was pretty bad.