The Lion King (2019) Review

The thing about Disney live action remakes I don't get is this: if it ain't broke, why fix it? I know the live action movies won't be as good as the originals, but I still watch them anyway. They suck you in with beautiful trailers which evoke our sense of nostalgia. And well, I genuinely want the movies to be good too. When I first saw a trailer of a live action Disney remake (I can't remember which one it was, but probably one of the earlier ones), I went, "Ah, Disney is running out of ideas! What's the point of making this again?" And even now, I'm still saying the same thing. I know they just want to earn our money, yet I'm still watching these remakes. This is the power of Disney, I suppose. 

Anyway, I just watched the remake of The Lion King and it wasn't as good as I had hoped. The trailer looked promising so I was super hyped. All the animals in the movie were so realistic! I was amazed by the detail and loved how cute the lions were because big cats remind me of house cats too, like my cat Shadow of course! So I was squealing whenever the lion cubs did something cute, like tumble on the ground while playing with each other. 

Speaking of that, I liked how they kept the details from the original movie, like how Nala would play with Simba and press her paw down on him to show that she was triumphant. I knew exactly what was going to happen next and I felt validated as a Disney fan when it happened, which is kinda dumb, I know, but I liked that they stuck to the original plot. 

One scene that stood out for me was a new one: it was when Simba's fur was carried down the river. Once that happened, I was like, "Ooh! Yes! And that's how Rafiki will know that he's alive and come to give him a lecture!" True enough, the lock of fur was carried by a bird, eaten by a giraffe and even became part of a dung beetle's dung ball, until it finally was carried by an ant at Rafiki's tree. I was so happy and validated when it finally reached the monkey!

However, they unfortunately took out the part where Rafiki lectures him about the past. It was such a memorable scene! In case you can't recall what happened, it's the part when Rafiki hits Simba with his stick and Simba goes "Ouch! What's that for?" at first, but Rafiki tells him that it doesn't matter because it's in the past! The past can hurt, but you can either run from it, or learn from it. Honestly, that scene was so meaningful and it made so much sense, so I'm devastated that it was left out.

The visuals were good, but I feel that they were also too good. It makes you feel that all these animals are real. But then, they start singing and it becomes unrealistic. And I already felt that this would be a problem at the part when Simba was about to start singing "I Just Can't Wait to be King" in order to lose Zazu and get to the Elephant Graveyard. Even before he started singing, I started wondering how the scene would look like and whether it would make me cringe. Most songs did make me cringe because I was taken out of the whole movie. But I also know that if the songs weren't added in, the audience would be in uproar and complain about it too. Damned if you do and damned if you don't, I guess.

And about the songs: I was disappointed with them. Don't get me wrong. I didn't walk into the movie theatre thinking that the songs would definitely sound good because of the cast. I didn't really look at the names or anything. I just went into the theatre looking forward to the Disney songs because of the brand Disney. 

First of all, I must admit that I'm probably extremely biased towards the original songs because I grew up with them and I've heard them a million times and still love them. But one very obvious and perhaps even unforgivable change is how the villain song became... (I hate to say it) boring. Disney villain songs were awesome, but Scar's 2019 rendition of the song "Be Prepared" was just anti-climactic. It was a lot shorter than the original and there was no build at all, if you know what I mean. When Scar started singing, I was so excited! But when he sang lyrics from what I recognised as the last verse of the original song and was already getting pretty loud (crescendo), I realised that he had nothing else to sing after that! And when he reached the end it was just like, "Huh, that's it?"

Let me get a few more things out of the way about the songs before I move on: I didn't like the explicit fart joke in "Hakuna Matata" and the fact that the lyrics were changed. I don't know about you, but I'm very sensitive to the lyrics of songs. If the singer mumbles and I can't really understand what he/she is singing, I can't appreciate the song. If the song consists of meaningless lyrics, I wouldn't like the song either. For "Hakuna Matata", I liked the fart joke the way it was presented in the original version because Pumbaa did not explicitly say the word "farted". If you weren't paying attention, you'd miss the joke (although it's actually still pretty hard to miss, since the movie gives us an image of Pumbaa walking over to drink water and animals are just passing out because of his smelly farts). 

I feel like instead of just stating it, children should be left to guess what Pumbaa is saying. Why must everything be spelled out for children these days? Aren't we spoonfeeding them too much? Come on, are they really that dumb? Is the movie too scary and dark that a fart joke has to be spelled out for us? 

And when Pumbaa sings that he thought of changing his name, Timon should have replied with, "Oh, what's in a name!" but in the remake he sings. "To what, Brad?" Oh my goodness. Whose idea was it to replace a Shakespearean quote with this nonsense? Does Disney think that Shakespeare isn't relevant anymore or something?

Another reason why realism worked against the movie was because the animals looked so realistic that it was difficult to tell how they felt. The movie failed to tug at my heartstrings. Trust me, I watched the original movie too many times to count and I still cried when Mufasa died. But when it came to the live action? I felt nothing. 

When Simba and Nala first explored the Elephant Graveyard, they were chased by the hyenas. That scene was certainly impressive because the cubs were frantically squeezing through tunnels and hyenas were popping up everywhere. And that stampede scene? Much, much better than the 1994 version, and therefore much scarier too. In fact, it was so scary that perhaps children would not have enjoyed it. There was a kid crying in a cinema and I wouldn't have been surprised if the kid was crying because the movie was frightening. Some of my students told me that the movie was scary and I was surprised, but now I get it. They are probably better off watching the 1994 movie. The last fight scene where Simba confronts Scar and the hyenas and lions start fighting was much longer than the original version too, and I felt that it was unnecessary.

I think that this was a decent movie overall. But storytelling is an art and this movie doesn't do it justice. What's the point of telling the same story in a different and less impactful way? Oh, right. I forgot again. Profits.