The Little Mermaid — Review Thread

These bad live action remakes of Disney classics tend to suck in two related but distinct ways: movies like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast which slavishly recreate their original films and seem completely redundant and pointless as a result and movies like Mulan and Dumbo that try to do new things with their properties and fall on their faces doing so because they’re inept. Both of these approaches have their pros and cons: the redundant one do tend to retain at least a little bit of what made those original movies worked while the “creative” ones at least potentially have the possibility of becoming worthwhile if handled well (as they occasionally are in cases like Pete’s Dragon and Cruella) but for the most part both are paths to failure. The most recent of these movies, The Little Mermaid is firmly in the “redundant and pointless” camp. The film more or less follows the exact same script as the 1989 film it’s trying to replicate and the few additions it does make (a couple extra songs and slight tweeks to the underwater power structure) are actively worse than anything that was in the original film. It also runs into some of the problems that the 2019 The Lion King ran into in which we’re seeing lush animation replaced by realistic CGI for a story that does not require or even really work with realism. On the other hand it also has the same basic advantage of The Lion King, which is that it’s replicating a bona fide Disney classic and at least some of what made that classic work is going to rub off on it. So, this movie inherits a reasonably good story, some good songs, and some worthwhile enough visual ideas and if you somehow watched this in a vacuum unaware that all of this was just being Xeroxed from another movie there may be some fun to be had with it, but how many people are really in that position? Not many. There are aspects of the movie that work fine like Halle Bailey’s performance but they don’t make up for the artistic bankruptcy of the whole endeavor. Granted that’s more or less a given for these movies so if there’s anything nice to say about this one it’s that it has the budget and source material to be more watchable than a true debacle like Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio, but that’s the faintest of praise.