If there’s one lesson we’ve all learned over the last decade, it’s that intellectual property is king. As consumers, we’re its subjects, and the navel-gazing nostalgia that now defines so much of Walt Disney Studios’ output is it’s blessing and curse. Sure, remakes like Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid saved the company from its early-’10s collapse – better to stuff up the schedule with easily-recognizable and shareholder-oriented properties with proven franchise potential than to squander it on Mars Needs Moms or The Lone Ranger – but they’ve also put the Studio in a bind. There are only so many of these films worth remaking before you start to reach the present, and the back catalog wears thin, as the remake derives much of its value from a limited pool of iconography. This is what serves to separate the Disney remake from most of the others: While many do-overs attempt to thematically or substantially divorce themselves from the original (with some acknowledgment of its influence), Disney doesn’t have the pretension of assuming that any of these movies will ever outlive the original. Instead, they’re footnotes, feature-length tributes closer in substance to a live televised performance of Grease on Fox or Peter Pan on NBC, only with the promotional budget of a Big Cultural Event and the theatrical rollout to match their ambitions.
In short, they aren’t trying; people are buying, leaving disappointed, but are endeared enough to the back catalog that they return for subsequent films, hoping that one or two might recapture the magic. But when you hire Rob Marshall to direct – a safe choice since he’s a company man and a director of musicals, chasing the unreachable high he set for himself when Chicago went right for Best Picture as his first major film – you’re ultimately betraying your ambitions. And make no mistake: The Little Mermaid is devoid of all wonder as if it had been dictated by the higher-ups to do so out of fear that they might, somehow, make a better movie than the original.
When it comes to these adaptations, the path to profitability that a given source material has can be measured out by which base it was born at: Pete’s Dragon is still at home, but Beauty and the Beast was born on second. By all practical measures, The Little Mermaid should have been born three inches away from home plate, with the entire infield and outfield somehow frozen in time. All one has to do is crawl that little distance and sit back and reap the rewards, but Marshall and company decided to just walk it back. Each choice is made with the primary intention of over-complicating a relatively simple fairy tale. You have Ariel (Halle Bailey), wanting to check out the human world above even if her father, King Triton (Javier Bardem), fears that humans, evil creatures that they are, will kill her just like they did her mother. She disregards his advice, of course, and saves a handsome young prince, Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), from a shipwreck and yearns to be with him in the aftermath, even if her father smashes up all of her relics from the surface world as her pals watch on, cowering in fear. So, what do you do when you need a pair of legs and the ability to breathe on land for long periods? Well, you turn to your disgraced aunt, Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), and make a deal with her that most certainly won’t go wrong, right? Anyhow, I’m not telling you anything particularly new here: just know that there’s a whole lot that’s new because it’s very hard to take an 83-minute animated movie and turn it into the kind of bladder-breaking behemoth that this movie is at 135 minutes.
Even at the 80-minute mark, it’d be a long sit. Marshall seems committed to preserving the worst aspects of the Disney live-action remake as if the markers that signify it as such weren’t flaws but simply genre conventions to conform to. The film looks like dogshit, with the same rushed VFX, darkened lighting, and desaturated color scheme, meant to obscure their flaws at the expense of clarity that defines the modern Disney output. This has often sunk the style of a modern Marvel product but has emerged as a prime aesthetic ethos for the whole company as it takes great pains to realistically depict fundamentally unrealistic worlds. Yet, at least something like The Lion King was fully committed to its digital construction, even if it failed to realize that animals cannot emote when speaking in the same way that humans can, and Marshall’s blend is particularly blighted. Enough parts of this film are fully constructed out of CGI, from the underwater landscapes to the mermaids themselves to the various sea creatures scuttling across the floor. It would have almost made sense to have a Roger Rabbit-style meeting of animated creatures and humans.
Marshall chooses to film Bailey from the waist up for most of the film, knowing that he’s only got so much budget for shots of her fishtail, so it’s not exactly jarring once she undergoes her mammalian transformation and grows a pair of legs. Yet even before that, the weird commitment to realistic detail morphs Bailey and all of the other sea people into hybrid creatures, with their faces superimposed on digital bodies, so that their hair may flow “realistically” under the water. This is to say nothing of the bizarre approach to “realism” that defines the film’s creature designs, which, after seeing how the company elided even mentioning Iago in Aladdin or Mushu in Mulan, viewers should probably be grateful that they’re in the movie in the first place. But the blending of realistic crab and cartoon fidelity in Sebastian or the Finding Nemo-like appearance of Scuttle (now a Gannet instead of a seagull) creates creatures that are just strange to behold and almost impossible to find endearing. As it attempts to depict a fantastic version of reality, it’s ultimately lifeless, made all the worse by the comparison to a far superior vision of aquatic paradise released by Disney just a few months ago (but then again, that’s just the Jim Cameron effect).
What’s particularly unforgivable is the casting, and I don’t mean Bailey, who does a pretty swell job with what she’s given. Marshall yadda-yaddas so much of Ariel’s development and the formation of her relationships with both the denizens of the ocean floor and those living in the bizarrely ahistorical-yet-rooted-in-history shorelines, and just by the story’s virtue, she’s robbed of expression for much of the film’s second act. She skillfully emotes, has a fabulous voice, and has a decent sense of the theatrics required for this type of lead. It’s only that she’s set up against a cast of performers so bored and indifferent or just plain wrong for the role they’ve been given that her efforts go wasted. As far as the live-action cast is concerned, Bardem is barely present, muttering through his lines while somehow trying to endow them with gravitas still (I imagine he was just happy to be on a water-filled set after spending so long in the desert with Denis Villeneuve).
McCarthy does her best to sell the campy qualities of Ursula’s villainy, but she’s let down by the weird nature of the film’s awkward sync-sound transitions between the recording studio and the set, with her trying her best to follow the flow and Marshall failing her in the edit. Her CGI appearance is also garish – another concession to “reality,” whatever the hell that is here – with her proportions being so far away from the cartoon version of the character that you’ve got to wonder why someone would even try to do something different in the first place. Hauer-King is left out to dry, carrying the film’s second half in a nervous frenzy, constantly talking and moving almost as if he’d been told the production would shut down if he took a moment to breathe. It’s an exaggerated performance that proves more overstimulating than energizing.
But as inert as the live-action cast is, the voice actors are somehow even worse. There was a benefit to the anonymity of professional voice actors, in that they could fully embody a character without having an easily-accessible physical presence in the audience’s minds. The children did not care who they were, much less the parents, so there was a level of genuine meritocracy there that is absent from the modern-day full-court press to get anyone with a recognizable name in these films. They also had capable animators working to craft characters’ motions and expressions around their performances, who also could lend an extra-expressive quality to their work. The setup as it currently stands is terrible for all involved. Hearing Daveed Diggs contorting himself to sound like Samuel E. Wright when he lacks the timber of the original Sebastian’s voice serves no one well, nor does Jacob Trembley’s actual age being close to Flounder’s intended one to make up for the lack of characterization or direction – simply saying “we’ve got a kid now” isn’t an excuse to just let your actors, well, flounder. But the pivotal moment, in which the entire enterprise of the modern-day Disney remake falls apart is when Awkwafina drops some Lin-Manuel Miranda-penned bars in a brand-new original song, a downright pointless concession to modern style that is ferociously out of sync with the rest of the film’s tone. But they’re also acknowledging a shift in their audience: these movies are primarily for adults, at this point, and they need those names to find mean something. In short, this is about brand leverage – easily identifiable ingredients – going into an act of corporate self-preservation.
I can’t remember where exactly I read this, but the idea that these remakes are more just about continual copyright extension feels true in this context in that they suggest an ulterior motive behind their development rather than wholesale creative bankruptcy. The truth is that it’s a kind of combination of the two. Sure, the properties primed first were the oldest – the ones most likely to fall out of legal favor, which were the more obscure ones – but as the profit margins increased (and the quality went down), they began running out of wells to tap. Remakes aren’t a wholesale creatively-empty enterprise but, as done by Disney, it’s hard to see them as anything more than mere advertisements for the Disney Vault, now unlocked by the magic of streaming. Every choice that Marshall makes here feels as if it were designed to make the viewer wish they were watching the original at home with their kids because if the end goal here was to provoke a sense of nostalgia in the adults while wowing the children, The Little Mermaid emphasizes the sadness and the longing at its core, rubbing it in your face that the days where movies like this were once “magical” are far in the rear-view. All that remains are the ghosts of what was as the hourglass drains.