The plot is about a young lion whose destiny to be king is put in danger following a tragedy which leads to him being exiled, and years later as an adult he must find a way to take back his kingdom and his rightful place as king.
The performances are unfortunately quite poor, James Earl Jones brings proming charm and likeability to the role of Mufasa, despite playing the same character and saying almost exactly the same lines as over twenty years ago. Chitwel Ejifor tries (and fails) to bring any sense of personality beyond that of a conventional villain, and he's quite easy to ignore. Another notable performance is John Oliver as Zazu. He makes no particular effort to try and do his own take on the character, but instead spends most of the film trying way too hard to sound like the original voice actor. And it gets to the point where it becomes so obvious that's what he's doing that it just becomes distracting.
The film was written by Jeff Nathanson and what stood out to me most about the script was how everything stayed the same as the original, in a shot for shot manner. From famous scenes, to the dialogue, to the songs. All of them just about stay untouched. And the changes that are made to the film are so minimal, being only a few lines and some scenes being stretched out to meet the film's longer runtime. I just see it as a script with more copying put into to it than actual hard work and effort.
The film was shot by Caleb Deschanel, and this film does somewhat redeem itself with the visuals. Although there's no standout moment for the cinematography you can't deny that film's visuals are quite impressive - Pride Rock looks surprisingly good and has a documentary-like look to it. The animals look striking too, you can see every little detail on some of them. And the actors portraying them do try to get their facial expressions across clearly, sometimes it works, others times they just say what they're feeling but you don't see it. If things like this are going to continue, it will need some more work, but this is a good start.
The score was composed by Hans Zimmer and most of his score just feels recycled from the previous film, and the songs as mentioned before are much the same but if you listen carefully you will hear one or two modern touches that have been put in. Once again this shows a disappointing lack of effort and what makes it even more disappointing is that this is the work of a highly-regarded composer, and here he has failed where he usually succeeds.
You would think all of the things mentioned above would have diminished my experience with this film but there was one flaw that trumped all the others, the film's lack of original ideas. Now I do understand what a remake is, it's been done before and some things must and usually do remain the same. But that doesn't mean that you can't bring some ideas of your own to it. I've seen it done well and I've seen it attempted and maybe it didn't get the outcome it hoped for. I recently saw a remake that did have some of its own ideas; it didn't entirely work out in its favour, but at least it tried. With remakes I suggest that some original ideas should maybe be tried instead of avoided, just so audiences don't get a film that's a longer version of something they have already seen.
The conclusions I draw from this are: The Lion King has poor voice performances; a mostly recycled script and the lack of effort is quite evident; with minimal new dialogue and a stretched-out runtime being the only notable changes; some visuals that are quite impressive but need work done to them; a a score that feels recycled and attempts to compensate for its laziness in a way that's maybe just as bad; and worst of all, lacking in original ideas.
Having taken all my pros and cons into account, I'm going to give The Lion King...
D
Thank you for reading.
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