This weekend, The Lion King hits South African cinemas.

You’ve seen all of the trailers, you’ve heard Beyoncé’s single, ‘Spirit’, and you are ready to shed some tears.

I don’t want to drop any spoilers here (yes, someone has accused us of dropping spoilers for the live-action remake of The Lion King), but there will be tugging on the heartstrings.

Also, good luck not watching this video three to four times:

When you’re just chilling & remember Lion King comes out this week. pic.twitter.com/kHGVc61BkD

— The Kiffness (@TheKiffness) July 15, 2019

It will still do huge, potentially record-breaking numbers at the box office, but not everyone who has seen the movie is raving about it.

Take Forbes, for example, which tells you to get ready for “a crushing disappointment”:

Yes, the visuals on display in Jon Favreau’s The Lion King are indeed impressive…However, like too many of these recent remakes of the Disney animated library, the emphasis is on “realism” at the expense of entertainment value. At almost every turn, this redo undercuts its own melodrama by downplaying its own emotions. The key direction seems to be “like the 1994 version, but less.”

The review says that “John Oliver is inexplicably bad as Zazu—it sounds like a bad dub”, before carrying on:

It exists only to remind you that the original movie is still, nitpicks and cultural issues aside, pretty great, and that they made most of the right choices the first time around. At almost every moment, this version is almost intentionally less urgent, less enchanting, less passionate and less operatic…

I did not demand a new Lion King that was superior to the original, nor do I consider that film to be an untouchable piece of artistic gospel (the stage show has some interesting alterations). But this is merely the same movie with a new coat of paint that renders it less magical. It may be worth seeing once for the visuals, but its redundancy and inferiority has rendered it artistically irrelevant.

Now that’s just one review, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

If you consider the Rotten Tomatoes score (61% at the time of writing, which isn’t great), and add in the fact that Metacritic has it at 57% (the site calls that “mixed or average reviews”), you can see Forbes is not alone.

In fact, via BuzzFeed News, let’s get to some of the real zingers:

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called the updated version a “soulless chimera of a film [that] comes off as little more than a glorified tech demo from a greedy conglomerate — a well-rendered but creatively bankrupt self-portrait of a movie studio eating its own tail.”

“But unlike with this year’s Dumbo, which pushed past the plot markers of the 1941 movie, or Aladdin, which saw an opportunity for the underserved Jasmine, the team behind The Lion King saw no room for improvement other than a hyperrealistic overhaul,” wrote Matt Patches, a senior editor at Vox’s Polygon.

Whilst he did have a few nice things to say, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw added that “the circle of commercial life has given birth to this all-but-indistinguishable digiclone descendant”.

I know, you’re still going to watch it, and so am I, and it’s still going to print money.

Just don’t expect too much magic.

[sources:forbes&buzzfeed]