Matt Reviews: Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Ah, Beauty and the Beast. My favorite Disney movie. Everything about this movie is magical: the songs, the characters, the breathtaking animation. Some say that Belle was my first crush. I don’t remember this, but I also don’t deny it. It was the first animated movie to be nominated for an Academy Award, and it certainly deserves that praise. Truly, it is a tale as old as time.

So why in the name of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont would you want to go and remake it?

For those of you who have been in a coma for the past twenty years, here’s the story: A prince (Dan Stevens) is cursed by an enchantress for being selfish and vain, transforming him into a hideous beast. His servants are also cursed for some reason, with them transformed into household objects. The curse can be lifted if the prince finds true love, but he must do so before the last petal of a magic rose falls. In a small provincial town, a girl named Belle (Emma Watson) is an outcast because she’s a woman who thinks. When here father (Kevin Kline) is taken prisoner by the Beast, Belle takes his place, and in her captivity, she learns to love the Beast as he falls for her as well. It’s not as Stockholm-y as it sounds.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first: the remake is nowhere near as good as the original. I know, shocker right? But it does try to be an expansion of the original film. It goes out of its way to try and explain some of the questions that people had from the original, like “Why does nobody notice that their prince has disappeared for several years?” and “How long was Belle with the Beast if the seasons changed so much?” It also changes a few things for the sake of clarity and storytelling, like leaving out all reference to the Beast’s age and how long the curse has lasted (so as to not make it seem like the Enchantress cursed an 11-year-old for being an 11-year-old). It also takes a cue from the stage musical by having the servants slowly transform into fully inanimate objects as the curse deepens, which actually makes the ending a lot sadder when it looks like the curse will never be broken.

Emma Watson is also not good as Belle. I’m sorry, Emma, I love you and all, but your Belle is blasé. Her acting is so dull and uninterested that I don’t think she strays from a blank expression for much of the movie, not counting for the occasional smirk that I guess is supposed to pass for human emotion. Her singing also isn’t very good. Now, I’m not musical expert and my singing is flat itself, but when Belle sings the opening number of the movie, I should feel something. And I felt nothing listening to her try to compete with Paige O’Hara.

There goes the studio with remakes like always/The same exact film to re-sell

The rest of the cast is hit-or-miss. Emma Thompson is okay as Mrs. Potts. I couldn’t tell if I liked Ewan McGregor as Lumiere or not because I was too distracted by his inconsistent French accent. (The movie makes time to explain all these things, but it still can’t explain why, in a movie set in France, the only one with the appropriate accent is the damn candlestick?) And while Ian McKellan is a fine actor, I didn’t really buy him as the fussy, neurotic Cogsworth. That’s the main problem with some of these characters, particularly the object-servants: the movie doesn’t give them the chance to show off what makes these characters memorable. Some of these characteristics are there, but they’re not explored enough like in the original and the actors don’t really convey these classic personalities to their full degree.

However, I did think Kevin Kline was good as Maurice, downplaying the wacky, screwup-ness of the original character to make him more believable. He even gets some good emotional scenes mourning is dead wife. Luke Evans worried me a bit when he was cast as Gaston, but he really surprised me in not just how well he played the character, but how well he played a villain. Dan Stevens is alright as the Beast, but I think I liked his performance better when he was acting like a villain at the beginning.

But I think my favorite casting – as well as my favorite character in this film – is Josh Gad as Le Fou. The film took Gaston’s one-note, bootlicking lackey from the original film and transformed him into a much more realized character. He’s much more moral than Gaston is, and even tries to act as his conscience at various points in the film. His character development was much appreciated, as the way he was written in the movie, I didn’t really want him to suffer the same way the other mob members did during the castle battle.

No one fought like Gaston/No one's wrought like Gaston/No one elicits scary gay thoughts like Gaston

And yes, like the news has been buzzing about, Le Fou is gay in this movie. They never outright state it, but his mannerisms and the way he interacts with Gaston make his sexual preference totally clear. I’m not sure if it’s an unpleasant stereotype to make him the sassy gay friend who lusts after a macho straight guy, so I don’t know whether or not this was a positive representation of the LGBT community. But on the whole, I really wish they would have just come out and said he was gay in the movie instead of awkwardly beating around the bush with it.

There’s four new songs added just for this film, and while they’re alright songs, they’re not very memorable. They allow some of the characters to show off their singing voices more than in the original film – like the Wardrobe and the Beast – but some of them didn’t really feel all that necessary. One of the songs actually felt like a discount version of “Human Again”, the cut song from the original theatrical release of the animated movie. Why not just put that song into the remake instead? It’d please the fans who liked that song, and boom! One less song you have to write for a longer runtime.

I’m also not crazy about the designs of things in this movie. The Beast looks far too human in my opinion, especially in the face. Really makes it hard to believe the “for who could ever learn to love a beast” line when he looks marginally more attractive than the animated version. All of the inanimate objects’ designs are either boring or creepy, with the exception of Lumiere, who I thought looked alright. Belle’s dress is no where as beautiful as the original, and at times, it looks more like a pricey prom dress than something a Disney Princess would wear. I think it’s the gloves. The remake ditched the gloves and it’s throwing the whole thing off. And while I think the exterior of the Beast’s castle has an ominous, gothic look to it, the interior is far from majesty. Everything just looks too small, especially the ballroom, which should look just as grandiose and magical as the original.

I think that’s where a lot of my problems lie with this movie: it’s just not as grand as the original. Nothing really elicits an awe-inspiring response from me like the animated version does. Most of the time, it feels more like I’m watching a well-done TV movie rather than a big budget Hollywood remake. The only part of the movie that I thought captured this sense of grandiosity was the “Be Our Guest” musical number, which managed to show off the movie’s special effects to a spectacular degree and make me kind of glad that I saw it in 3D (it was the only showing that was convenient with my schedule). It also has the best new joke in the whole film (“After all, miss, this is France.” Cue vegetable guillotine. Dark.) But even then, the ballroom scene should have received the same level of effort in order to remain a showstopper like in the original. I mean, it’s the titular song, for Walt’s sake!

Be our guest/To detest/Disney please give it a rest/I am praying to the Lord that Aladdin won't be a mess

The film is largely a shot-for-shot, word-for-word remake of the original with not a lot of significant changes. The few changes they do add seem pointless to the overall story. The tragic backstories of Bell and the Beast? Not plot-relevant. The Enchantress living in the village as an old beggar woman and being around the castle to personally lift the curse? Goes nowhere. The fact that, in addition to the rose and the mirror, the Beast also has an ENCHANTED BOOK THAT ALLOWS HIM TO INSTANTLY TELEPORT TO ANYWHERE ON EARTH? Yeah, you bet that sucker’s never used, seen, or heard from again. Seriously, you can NOT just throw something this big into a movie like this and not expect questions to be raised. This could have been their big new change to add to the movie to distance it from the original. But, nope. Bell and the Beast go to Paris, Belle learns her mother died from the plague (yeah, real big secret you were keeping there, Maurice), and the movie continues on like the book never existed. WHAT?!

Overall, the remake seemed entirely unnecessary. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the original that needed improved upon. When it comes to older movies like Cinderella or The Jungle Book, an argument for a remake makes more sense. These are older movies that often have larger story or logic problems. Sometimes the storytelling wasn’t always the best or characters weren’t the most defined, so a modern-day remake could definitely fix things and add in new twists that play with these classic stories. But Beauty and the Beast isn’t even thirty years old. It already comes from an era of modern storytelling that put focus on dynamic characters. And there’s no new twists here that change or play with the story at all. Now I’m actually kind of nervous for the other remakes of 1990’s Disney movies that the studio has planned.

If there was no animated Beauty and the Beast movie, with the live action one being Disney’s first iteration of the fairy tale, it still wouldn’t be a great film. On its own, it’s just a meh movie with bland characters, bland acting, and bland visuals. But since it is a remake of a previous movie – and a beloved one at that – it needs to be compared. Nearly everything about the remake is inferior to the original, and it lacks much of the charm that the animated version had. While some aspects are expanded upon, nothing is really added or changed that affected the overall story to make it something different. If you want to see a really spectacular Beauty and the Beast movie, go watch the original instead. To paraphrase one of the film’s timeless musical numbers, there’s nothing here that wasn’t there before.

Tale as old as time/Barely even thirty/Characters made of wood/The cartoon looked so good/So expectedly

 Final verdict: 5.5/10.

So does this mean they’ll be doing a live action remake of Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas? I won’t see it until they bring back Tim Curry as Forte.