"Beauty and the Beast (2017)" Review - A Beauty with Everything There That Was There Befor

Beauty and the Beast is a pretty good remake with a lot of effort put into it that doesn’t really bring anything amazing to the table, but still is able to satisfy all ages alike. I’m going to take my pros and cons step by step.

The pros: The acting/voicing by everyone is pretty perfect. Luke Evans and Josh Gad absolutely steal the show. I was constantly smiling and laughing witnessing how talented those 2 were together. The only thing I wish could’ve been better was Ewan McGregor’s terrible French accent. I mean, Jerry Orbach’s was bad too, but it was on a level of Dick Van Dyke cockney charming, not at a level of totally Mexican. LOL. The orchestrations by Alan Menken were gorgeous as usual, and the settings were very well crafted and I loved that they were pretty practical for the most part.

The cons: Dan Stevens and Emma Watson can’t sing for their life, and it showed with the autotune and lack of acting on their songs, which really disappointed me. It’s great that everyone else can sing, but when the two leads can’t, it’s kind of a downer. Speaking of singing, I hated three of the four songs in this remake. They served no purpose to the story at all and they were not memorable in the slightest bit, especially the Audra McDonald song at the beginning. I love her, but that great prologue should not have been interrupted that abruptly. I did really love “Evermore” a lot, as it reminded me of “Out There” and “If I Can’t Love Her”. It had the Alan Menken magic I knew and loved. It didn’t really help that Dan Stevens couldn’t sing, but it’s a brilliant song nevertheless. Disney will get an Oscar nom for that song, which is what they wanted, otherwise they would just use the Broadway musical songs which were much better.

There were two things that really bugged me though that I’m definitely going to go into more depth about. First is the VFX. I knew that with Bill Condon as the director, he would crush it with the visuals. That’s what he does best. Just look at “Chicago” and “Dreamgirls”. His direction with the visuals was great, and his vision really meant to be well, but unfortunately, the VFX didn’t translate with the objects well. The only two I really enjoyed visually were Cogsworth and Mrs. Potts. Every other object either looked too saturated or just campy as hell. I am also really annoyed that Disney couldn’t use practical effects on the Beast, because the CGI on him was so bad. I mean, you could literally put the Broadway costume on CGI stilts, and maybe CGI the fact a little bit, and you got a solid beast. I will never know why that didn’t happen, because out of all the things you could make real life in this film, the Beast should’ve been the easiest.

The other annoying thing was some of the revisions to the story, and I'm not talking about how Belle is made more feminist for literally 1 minute of the entire film. I don’t have anything against revisions, but some of these rewrites made some major plot holes. Now, the original had plot holes too, let’s be honest, but the revisions to this story either seemed very forced or just make the plot holes that the original had even worse. I know it’s a fairy tale, but since this film is live action and you want to revise the story even more, you gotta focus on keeping the holes in your story as small and as not noticeable as possible. Sometimes simple holes in the story are okay, as no one will think about them if they aren’t noticeable the first viewing. For examples of what I’m talking (MINOR SPOILERS, SKIP TO NEXT PARAGRAPH), let’s just say you can’t recover objects from the past if you’re glimpsing into the past, and you can’t forget about assault of a town citizen if someone is a Trump like con man. The worst though is if the last pedal falls, the curse is not broken! The end.

Overall, if you like Beauty and the Beast and don’t care about the small details, you’ll probably enjoy it. It’s not Maleficent bad, but it’s not Jungle Book good either. For this remake, I really wanted it to be taken seriously as Jungle Book, and unfortunately that didn’t happen, which is sad because this movie is Disney’s “Godfather”, or “Casablanca”. To say I want to remake this film is a pretty serious thing to say. I guess all I can say is go see it for yourself, but if you want my opinion, rent the one made in 1991. Beauty and the Beast (1991) is so brilliant in every single way possible and I think is one of the best animated films ever. Everyone should know it as a game changer, not a fairy tale cash grab. Yes, a game changer, that's how much I respect Disney. They change the game. They did it in every movie in 2016, they did it in the 90s, and that's what I hope they can be known for for future attempts to remake the classics.

One Nebs Up!