If you’ve been reading my reviews for pretty much any amount of time, you’ll know that I am a Disney fan. Beauty and the Beast has never been one of my favourites, but that isn’t to say I don’t like it. When the first teaser trailer came out for this film, you know, with Lumiere and Cogsworth saying “it’s a girl…” and the rose and the music and… well, I was excited. For some reason I thought, how could this possibly go wrong?
I’m currently halfway through and I am, how do I say this? Bored. It doesn’t have nearly the same magic as the animated version. It doesn’t pack the same emotional punch. I do not care that Belle and the Beast are falling in love. I don’t care. I want to see more of Gaston and Le Fou to be honest. Where are they? I miss them. And that Wardrobe? She’s fricken terrifying. The music is lackluster at best. Emma Watson is even falling flat for me and I typically really enjoy her acting.
I see what Disney has tried to do – they’ve tried to take a classic and modernize it, make it a more detailed “masterpiece,” but it’s fallen oh-so-flat. The added effects and added details look like just that – add-ons tacked on to make the movie something “original.” It feels so… cheap and tacky. Why do we need to keep taking classic, wonderful animated films and making garish, distasteful karaoke versions of them? If you’re going to remake a film like Beauty and the Beast, you have to at least breathe some fresh air into it. Keep that aroma of familiarity, but make it something better, not something… like this.
Not to mention, they took this opportunity to create a very openly homosexual character… and that character was who?? Le Fou – a bumbling fool, an idiot, the villainous sidekick of Gaston. That’s just depressing. You could choose any character in any reimagining and make them gay, and you chose Le Fou. We have better LGBT representation in Paranorman (“You’re gonna love my boyfriend!”) Just… wow.
To be honest, unless you’re a mega fan of the original film, I’d skip this one. It left me feeling as though I need to watch the original as “eye bleach” and feeling resentful that I had wasted not only $4.99 on the Google Play store to rent it, but also two-and-a-half hours of my life that I could have spent watching something with actual substance and style. This is not a film I want in my collection. This is not a film I want to see again. I’ll stick to the tried and true, thank you very much.
