Aladdin Review

Aladdin is directed by Guy Ritchie and stars Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Marwan Kenzari, Navid Negabahan, Nashim Pedrad, Billy Magnussen and of course Will Smith as the Genie.

The film revolves around the titular character who falls in love with a princess and wants to impress her, and is given the chance to do so when a man named Jafar asks him to go into a cave to find and bring him a lamp... which has the power to grant him three wishes.

The performances are quite mixed, some leave no impression at all while others leave you mildly impressed. The standout performance for me would have to be Marwan Kenzari as Jafar. I found him to be intense, very engaging and interesting to watch, and above all he was believable in the role.
I will briefly mention Will Smith as the genie, The controversy his casting caused was completely unjustified. It's just another Will Smith performance where he spends the entire film going around with his one-note sense of humour. The only difference is sometimes we see him in blue CGI, an average effect, or we see him in human form. That's all I will say on the matter.

The film was written by John August and Guy Ritchie. I can say that they have definitely succeeded in transplanting key characters and well-known songs from the previous film version to this new adaptation. The thing that struck me most about the script was its emphasis on comedy, and in case you are wondering, the film does contain some of Guy Ritchie's usual movie tropes. An example of this is things being explained out loud as they are also being shown onscreen.

The film was shot by Alan Stewart and it is my regret to say that nothing stands out about the cinematography, at best all you get is a few shots of a vast desert and some exteriors of the main city, both of which I would concede are impressive.

The score was composed by Alan Menken who also composed the score for the previous film. Here he has come up with a score that seems no more than passable, as if his mind and efforts were more focused on the songs. Getting onto the songs now, I feel somewhat conflicted about them as each one got a very different response from me than the last.  With one of them I thought they were trying too hard, another not hard enough. And then just done well enough for me to take notice. In the end I would have to call the music in this film middling.

Here is the one flaw I have with the film, it's just too long. With a runtime of 128 minutes, instead of telling the audience a familiar story with something new occasionally thrown in, the film chooses to drag out as many scenes as it can for as long as it can. It even felt like a whole hour had passed before we even got to the main plot of the film. Maybe they could have got away with this first time around but surely not in a remake of a story this well known. I find this to be a disappointment and hope lessons are learned if these remakes are to continue.

The conclusions I draw from this are, Aladdin has one standout performance, a script that respects the original source material and has ideas of its own that it wishes to pursue. Some impressive shots to be found in the cinematography, and a middling score featuring songs that will depend on how you feel at the end of each one. And of the course the film suffers horribly from being overlong and having scenes that are dragged out as far as they can go.

Having taken all my pros and cons into account, I'm going to give Aladdin...
C-

Thank you for reading.