Miserable, lonely, and depressed (pathetic)
One of the very first lines of dialogue spoken in the 1989 animated feature The Little Mermaid is "A fine strong wind and a following sea. King Triton must be in a friendly-type mood." The approximately equivalent line of dialogue in the 2023 remake of that same film is "This is a dangerous time. Tonight's the coral moon. They say this is when the Sea King calls his mermaid daughters together to lure men to their deaths." And I think that just about sums up all the differences between the two: energetic, bouncy delight and a rollicking sense of adventure versus suffocating misery and despair and gloominess.
In this respect, The Little Mermaid '23 is nothing more nor less than an exemplar of the Walt Disney Company's ongoing attempt to take what is beautifully expressive and aesthetically rich about its unmatched canon of animated features stretching back to 1937, and turn it into grey paste. I will say this in praise of The Little Mermaid: as the last remake of the Big Four titles from the studio's 1990s renaissance, it's definitely not the worst, nor the ugliest. The 2017 Beauty and the Beast is substantially more aggressive in its gaudy tastelessness, and the 2019 The Lion King goes much farther in allowing a cultish dedication to photorealism to strangle every possible molecule of life out of the settings and the characters and the overall momentum. The Little Mermaid is 135 minutes long, and it has absolutely no right to be, but it feels 135 minutes long; The Lion King is 118 minutes long, but feels twice that. So, hooray for being on the upswing. And of course, all of this does sum up to "but anyway, the 2019 Aladdin is still the best remake of a '90s Disney film", which reflects a pretty horrific track record for these things.
The basic story of the new screenplay (by David Magee and an undoubtedly large number of uncredited executive tinkerers) was the basic story in 1989, so it's unclear how this version is somehow 52 god-damn-your-eyes minutes longer: there's a mermaid, Ariel (Halle Bailey) who is unhealthily interested in the world of land-dwelling humans, and this interest only grows sharper when she saves Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), prince of the local island kingdom, from death by shipwreck. Defying the explicit ruling of her father, the widowed sea-king Triton (Javier Bardem), she makes a terrible deal with the sea-witch Ursula (Melissa McCarthy): become a human, in exchange for your voice. And then follows three days of falling properly in love with Eric while remaining unable to communicate her identity to him, all while Ursula plots to use this whole event as leverage to usurp Triton's throne. There are some additional doodles in on the edges: Ursula and Triton are now explicitly siblings (which is probably the easiest single place to go if you wanted to bulk up Ursula's backstory, not that I really think you'd need to); Eric is an orphan who resists the duties of royalty (this is not an easy place to have gone at all and I am frankly at a total loss to explain why in the hell they did so, except to have a ready-to-go explanation for casting Hauer-King, a white man from London, as the son of Noma Dumezweni, a black woman from Swaziland). The add-ons are quite a bit more effectively woven into the pre-existing narrative structure than they were in Beauty and the Beast, for one, though it still feels as it did with that film that they're trying to solve problems that don't exist.
Still, the bones are good enough that the film really ought to be better than it is, and I think the blame for this disproportionately falls onto two men, primarily: director Rob Marshall and cinematographer Dion Beebe. Or, anyway, the problem is mostly to do with the directing and the cinematography, and I don't know that we can really blame Marshall and Beebe for executing the horrible anti-aesthetic that is the default mode of live-action filmmaking at Disney these days. You might be pissed off at the specific oak tree that fell onto your house and caved in your roof, but it's still the thunderstorm's fault, and Disney is a powerful weather system indeed. Either way, The Little Mermaid is a visual disaster. It peaks at "not actively unpleasant to look at" in its daytime exteriors, when things are flat and the sky is a milky shade of white, but at least you can see, like, the textures of costumes and the colors of props and things. When it's underwater - and unsurprisingly, a film called The Little Mermaid spends a lot of time underwater, it is a CGI nightmare of failures, in many different forms. Up near the surface, where there's some daylight, it's plasticky and hollow, full of bright surfaces with no detail, looking like a very expensive aquarium screen saver, with actors hovering over it in some shots where the compositing is so bad that it's almost charming. The deeper we go into the depths - or, God forbid, anytime that it's night, above the water or below it - the more it turns into a simply depraved exhibition of what happens when "realistic lighting motivation" gets out of control, and making sure things are covered in a thick, murky blanket of damp darkness becomes the chief goal in and of itself, rather than using the visual powers of cinema to evoke deep underwater murk. This is even more impenetrably dim than fellow Disney-produced water picture Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and to more ruinous effect: some of the film's most narratively critical scenes, including Ariel's "I Want" song "Part of Your World" and the stormy climax, are so damned indistinct that I literally would not have been able to tell what was going on if I didn't remember it from the 1989 film.
So that's Film-Killing Problem #1. As for Film-Killing Problem #2, even though I just sort of tried to excuse Marshall's directing - he's not the first person to make an absolute hash out of one of these remakes - it would be irresponsible to deny that a lot of what sucks about The Little Mermaid sucks in a manner that rather resembles how things have sucked in every one of his previous theatrical features.* The Little Mermaid is Marshall's seventh feature, the fifth of those to be a musical, and his third consecutive musical for Disney (following 2014's Into the Woods and 2018's Mary Poppins Returns. It's actually the fourth Disney film in a row for Marshall, starting with 2011's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which of course isn't in a musical, though I don't imagine it would have been any worse if it had been). With that kind of filmography, it remains thoroughly dazzling to me that Marshall still doesn't have the first fucking clue how to direct a movie musical. I might even go so far as to say that he's getting worse at it, or maybe it's just that he hates musicals so much that his only interest now lies in ruining them. At any rate, it's hard to think of any moment in his career more profoundly abject than "Part of Your World", which is one of the very worst musical numbers that I think I have seen in any movie. It is, as I have already mentioned, preposterously dark, dark enough that you can't really see anything. But also, it's pretty obviously the case that there's nothing worth seeing. Where the equivalent scene in the 1989 film followed the cues of Howard Ashman's yearning lyrics and Alan Menken's soaring childish romanticism in the music by showcasing all of the junk that Ariel has elevated into the most priceless of treasures, Marshall's treatment is so fixedly attached to medium shots and medium close-ups of Bailey that it's kind of unclear whether the space around her even contains any props. The blocking of the adorable moment "What d'you call 'em? Oh, feet" is particularly wretched, having Ariel sitting placidly on a rock looking up at nothing in particular, and certainly not apparently thinking about feet, or any other part of the leg; the camera hasn't even pulled out far enough for us to see her own fins. It's barely even using the song for storytelling at all, just plugging it in because it's too famous to cut (which the film isn't shy about doing: "Part of Your World" is the third number in the 1989 film, but the first number here, and later on the sublime comic number "Les Poissons" will be kicked to the curb as well), and staging it like Bailey is giving a concert in a black box theater. It ruins her performance; she's trying extremely hard to put all the emotions into her singing that she can, and she's got a terrifically strong voice that makes easy work of all those lofty notes, but she's got nothing to actually play, so the best thing she can come up with on her own is to skillfully copy the exact cadences of Jodi Benson's original performances.
This is the moment that Marshall's ineptitude with the form ruins the most, but it's not the only one. He also butchers the big musical showstopper "Under the Sea" - the very song that made musical showstoppers part of the vocabulary of animated films! - by cutting, seemingly at random, to CGI B-roll of dolphins or fish. The CGI crab Sebastian (Daveed Diggs), who looks just cartoony enough to have readable expressions and is therefore the only one of this film's CGI talking animals who is acceptable whatsoever, is no longer giving us a grand demonstration of the pleasures of life under the sea, he's just talking about random things that rhyme. If there's any moment where I felt that Marshall actually, literally hates musicals, it was this one: after having devoted his entire film career to the most hyper-literal staging concepts conceivable for musical numbers, now is the moment when he decides not to do that, so when Sebastian sings about a "hot crustacean band", we get a busy shot that contains neither crustaceans nor a band. But I do have to admit that it is the one (1) time that Marshall sees fit to give us a wide shot of all the dancing photorealistic fish that have sometimes crept into the shots elsewhere in this number, and I mean, thank you for including any wide shots in your showstopping production number, I guess.
The film's dismal failure as a musical shouldn't obscure its failures on all other fronts. The film's sluggish re-enactment of every plot beat from the 1989 film means that there are guardrails around everything, but there's still very little here that actively works. The cast is giving the film as much as they can: Bailey is clearly devoted to the character and not afraid to mug, and thanks to her oddly-shaped, Claudette Colbert-esque face, she ends up being wonderfully expressive when she's playing the character as a mute (the film is, in general, obviously better when it's on land - mostly because of the lighting, but that has positive downstream effects, e.g. "now I can see the actors"). McCarthy is enjoying swanning about melodramatically with an Old Hollywood diva voice, even though it's, like extremely clear that she's not interacting with anybody or anything else, and she has not been given clear instructions on what to do with her arms. Really, the only unacceptably bad performance comes from Bardem, who barely seems awake and isn't trying to convince us that he has anything resembling parental feelings towards Bailey. I think some of it is in the writing, which generally hardens Triton, but there's also a lot in Bardem's droning, disinterested performance that robs the character of all the pathos he allows the bubble up in the original movie, in between the imperious ranting. (Awkwafina's vocal performance as the idiot seabird Scuttle is also pretty bad, but in her case, she's obviously just giving the filmmakers what they're asking for. Also, I'm not sure that there exists anyone who could successfully deliver the surreally bad Lin-Manuel Miranda rap that she's been saddled with, the worst of the film's three new songs, none of which are good).
Anyway, a game cast salvages this from the worst depths the Disney remakes can sink to - Bailey is on a completely different level from Emma Watson's dead-eyed, autotuned-to-hell-and-back performance in Beauty and the Beast, for example - but it's not nearly enough. The film has absolutely no sense of fun, just a droning commitment to checking all of the boxes and presenting us with the unfathomably boring anti-spectacle of seeing photorealistic fish flap their mouths in a simulation of talking (which isn't as cosmically repulsive as the animals doing the same in The Lion King, so it's not even memorably disgusting). There's absolutely no magic here, just a dismal grind through realistic sea bottom footage, looking so resolutely plain that it's almost embarrassing to hear Menken's score rising in ecstasy to beg us to pretend that things like the pointy green mound of algae that currently plays Triton's castle is somehow awe-inspiring. I do not feel in luck here, down in the muck here, not one little bit.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*Every time a new Rob Marshall film comes out, I remind myself with horrid wonderment that his artistic peak as a director of motion pictures remains the 1999 TV movie version of Annie.
In this respect, The Little Mermaid '23 is nothing more nor less than an exemplar of the Walt Disney Company's ongoing attempt to take what is beautifully expressive and aesthetically rich about its unmatched canon of animated features stretching back to 1937, and turn it into grey paste. I will say this in praise of The Little Mermaid: as the last remake of the Big Four titles from the studio's 1990s renaissance, it's definitely not the worst, nor the ugliest. The 2017 Beauty and the Beast is substantially more aggressive in its gaudy tastelessness, and the 2019 The Lion King goes much farther in allowing a cultish dedication to photorealism to strangle every possible molecule of life out of the settings and the characters and the overall momentum. The Little Mermaid is 135 minutes long, and it has absolutely no right to be, but it feels 135 minutes long; The Lion King is 118 minutes long, but feels twice that. So, hooray for being on the upswing. And of course, all of this does sum up to "but anyway, the 2019 Aladdin is still the best remake of a '90s Disney film", which reflects a pretty horrific track record for these things.
The basic story of the new screenplay (by David Magee and an undoubtedly large number of uncredited executive tinkerers) was the basic story in 1989, so it's unclear how this version is somehow 52 god-damn-your-eyes minutes longer: there's a mermaid, Ariel (Halle Bailey) who is unhealthily interested in the world of land-dwelling humans, and this interest only grows sharper when she saves Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), prince of the local island kingdom, from death by shipwreck. Defying the explicit ruling of her father, the widowed sea-king Triton (Javier Bardem), she makes a terrible deal with the sea-witch Ursula (Melissa McCarthy): become a human, in exchange for your voice. And then follows three days of falling properly in love with Eric while remaining unable to communicate her identity to him, all while Ursula plots to use this whole event as leverage to usurp Triton's throne. There are some additional doodles in on the edges: Ursula and Triton are now explicitly siblings (which is probably the easiest single place to go if you wanted to bulk up Ursula's backstory, not that I really think you'd need to); Eric is an orphan who resists the duties of royalty (this is not an easy place to have gone at all and I am frankly at a total loss to explain why in the hell they did so, except to have a ready-to-go explanation for casting Hauer-King, a white man from London, as the son of Noma Dumezweni, a black woman from Swaziland). The add-ons are quite a bit more effectively woven into the pre-existing narrative structure than they were in Beauty and the Beast, for one, though it still feels as it did with that film that they're trying to solve problems that don't exist.
Still, the bones are good enough that the film really ought to be better than it is, and I think the blame for this disproportionately falls onto two men, primarily: director Rob Marshall and cinematographer Dion Beebe. Or, anyway, the problem is mostly to do with the directing and the cinematography, and I don't know that we can really blame Marshall and Beebe for executing the horrible anti-aesthetic that is the default mode of live-action filmmaking at Disney these days. You might be pissed off at the specific oak tree that fell onto your house and caved in your roof, but it's still the thunderstorm's fault, and Disney is a powerful weather system indeed. Either way, The Little Mermaid is a visual disaster. It peaks at "not actively unpleasant to look at" in its daytime exteriors, when things are flat and the sky is a milky shade of white, but at least you can see, like, the textures of costumes and the colors of props and things. When it's underwater - and unsurprisingly, a film called The Little Mermaid spends a lot of time underwater, it is a CGI nightmare of failures, in many different forms. Up near the surface, where there's some daylight, it's plasticky and hollow, full of bright surfaces with no detail, looking like a very expensive aquarium screen saver, with actors hovering over it in some shots where the compositing is so bad that it's almost charming. The deeper we go into the depths - or, God forbid, anytime that it's night, above the water or below it - the more it turns into a simply depraved exhibition of what happens when "realistic lighting motivation" gets out of control, and making sure things are covered in a thick, murky blanket of damp darkness becomes the chief goal in and of itself, rather than using the visual powers of cinema to evoke deep underwater murk. This is even more impenetrably dim than fellow Disney-produced water picture Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and to more ruinous effect: some of the film's most narratively critical scenes, including Ariel's "I Want" song "Part of Your World" and the stormy climax, are so damned indistinct that I literally would not have been able to tell what was going on if I didn't remember it from the 1989 film.
So that's Film-Killing Problem #1. As for Film-Killing Problem #2, even though I just sort of tried to excuse Marshall's directing - he's not the first person to make an absolute hash out of one of these remakes - it would be irresponsible to deny that a lot of what sucks about The Little Mermaid sucks in a manner that rather resembles how things have sucked in every one of his previous theatrical features.* The Little Mermaid is Marshall's seventh feature, the fifth of those to be a musical, and his third consecutive musical for Disney (following 2014's Into the Woods and 2018's Mary Poppins Returns. It's actually the fourth Disney film in a row for Marshall, starting with 2011's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which of course isn't in a musical, though I don't imagine it would have been any worse if it had been). With that kind of filmography, it remains thoroughly dazzling to me that Marshall still doesn't have the first fucking clue how to direct a movie musical. I might even go so far as to say that he's getting worse at it, or maybe it's just that he hates musicals so much that his only interest now lies in ruining them. At any rate, it's hard to think of any moment in his career more profoundly abject than "Part of Your World", which is one of the very worst musical numbers that I think I have seen in any movie. It is, as I have already mentioned, preposterously dark, dark enough that you can't really see anything. But also, it's pretty obviously the case that there's nothing worth seeing. Where the equivalent scene in the 1989 film followed the cues of Howard Ashman's yearning lyrics and Alan Menken's soaring childish romanticism in the music by showcasing all of the junk that Ariel has elevated into the most priceless of treasures, Marshall's treatment is so fixedly attached to medium shots and medium close-ups of Bailey that it's kind of unclear whether the space around her even contains any props. The blocking of the adorable moment "What d'you call 'em? Oh, feet" is particularly wretched, having Ariel sitting placidly on a rock looking up at nothing in particular, and certainly not apparently thinking about feet, or any other part of the leg; the camera hasn't even pulled out far enough for us to see her own fins. It's barely even using the song for storytelling at all, just plugging it in because it's too famous to cut (which the film isn't shy about doing: "Part of Your World" is the third number in the 1989 film, but the first number here, and later on the sublime comic number "Les Poissons" will be kicked to the curb as well), and staging it like Bailey is giving a concert in a black box theater. It ruins her performance; she's trying extremely hard to put all the emotions into her singing that she can, and she's got a terrifically strong voice that makes easy work of all those lofty notes, but she's got nothing to actually play, so the best thing she can come up with on her own is to skillfully copy the exact cadences of Jodi Benson's original performances.
This is the moment that Marshall's ineptitude with the form ruins the most, but it's not the only one. He also butchers the big musical showstopper "Under the Sea" - the very song that made musical showstoppers part of the vocabulary of animated films! - by cutting, seemingly at random, to CGI B-roll of dolphins or fish. The CGI crab Sebastian (Daveed Diggs), who looks just cartoony enough to have readable expressions and is therefore the only one of this film's CGI talking animals who is acceptable whatsoever, is no longer giving us a grand demonstration of the pleasures of life under the sea, he's just talking about random things that rhyme. If there's any moment where I felt that Marshall actually, literally hates musicals, it was this one: after having devoted his entire film career to the most hyper-literal staging concepts conceivable for musical numbers, now is the moment when he decides not to do that, so when Sebastian sings about a "hot crustacean band", we get a busy shot that contains neither crustaceans nor a band. But I do have to admit that it is the one (1) time that Marshall sees fit to give us a wide shot of all the dancing photorealistic fish that have sometimes crept into the shots elsewhere in this number, and I mean, thank you for including any wide shots in your showstopping production number, I guess.
The film's dismal failure as a musical shouldn't obscure its failures on all other fronts. The film's sluggish re-enactment of every plot beat from the 1989 film means that there are guardrails around everything, but there's still very little here that actively works. The cast is giving the film as much as they can: Bailey is clearly devoted to the character and not afraid to mug, and thanks to her oddly-shaped, Claudette Colbert-esque face, she ends up being wonderfully expressive when she's playing the character as a mute (the film is, in general, obviously better when it's on land - mostly because of the lighting, but that has positive downstream effects, e.g. "now I can see the actors"). McCarthy is enjoying swanning about melodramatically with an Old Hollywood diva voice, even though it's, like extremely clear that she's not interacting with anybody or anything else, and she has not been given clear instructions on what to do with her arms. Really, the only unacceptably bad performance comes from Bardem, who barely seems awake and isn't trying to convince us that he has anything resembling parental feelings towards Bailey. I think some of it is in the writing, which generally hardens Triton, but there's also a lot in Bardem's droning, disinterested performance that robs the character of all the pathos he allows the bubble up in the original movie, in between the imperious ranting. (Awkwafina's vocal performance as the idiot seabird Scuttle is also pretty bad, but in her case, she's obviously just giving the filmmakers what they're asking for. Also, I'm not sure that there exists anyone who could successfully deliver the surreally bad Lin-Manuel Miranda rap that she's been saddled with, the worst of the film's three new songs, none of which are good).
Anyway, a game cast salvages this from the worst depths the Disney remakes can sink to - Bailey is on a completely different level from Emma Watson's dead-eyed, autotuned-to-hell-and-back performance in Beauty and the Beast, for example - but it's not nearly enough. The film has absolutely no sense of fun, just a droning commitment to checking all of the boxes and presenting us with the unfathomably boring anti-spectacle of seeing photorealistic fish flap their mouths in a simulation of talking (which isn't as cosmically repulsive as the animals doing the same in The Lion King, so it's not even memorably disgusting). There's absolutely no magic here, just a dismal grind through realistic sea bottom footage, looking so resolutely plain that it's almost embarrassing to hear Menken's score rising in ecstasy to beg us to pretend that things like the pointy green mound of algae that currently plays Triton's castle is somehow awe-inspiring. I do not feel in luck here, down in the muck here, not one little bit.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*Every time a new Rob Marshall film comes out, I remind myself with horrid wonderment that his artistic peak as a director of motion pictures remains the 1999 TV movie version of Annie.
