The Little Mermaid is yet another live-action Disney remake. As far as this “genre” of films from the studio that are made to cash in on nostalgia goes, it’s pretty inoffensive yet unremarkable in most respects. While that isn’t high praise, it does make it one of the better ones that have come out over the past decade or so.
Director Rob Marshall is known for directing musicals on the big screen, even winning an Oscar for his first feature, 2002’s Chicago. The Little Mermaid isn’t going to reach those levels of accolades, but it’s (probably) not going to be totally maligned like some of the previous Disney remakes either. The first act is pretty much a beat-for-beat copy of the animated movie, with a couple of scenes and songs moved around or omitted entirely but minimal changes beyond that. Nothing is bad about it per se, but it’s all just a reminder of the animated version. For this portion of the story, things are just going through the motions, and the film isn’t even bothering to try to stand as its own thing.
Things pick up when Ariel becomes a human and finally gets to experience the surface world. Eric as a character is much more developed in this iteration of the story, and we even get to know his backstory and meet his mother, who shares similar views of the sea and its creatures as Ariel’s father King Triton does of the land. This helps make the least engaging part of the animated movie a highlight in the live-action version. It showcases how Ariel and Eric are kindred spirits in being misfits within their respective royal families and takes the time to allow them to bond over their shared interest in exploration.
This section also happens to contain the best of the film’s three new songs, which range from pleasant to shudder-inducing. It’s highly unlikely any of them will win a coveted “best original song” award these musical filmmakers are clearly gunning for by always adding additional numbers in musical adaptations, and they’re especially underwhelming coming from Alan Menken (returning from the animated movie) and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who has provided Disney with some of its biggest breakout songs in recent years, having done the soundtracks for Moana and Encanto. The ones brought back from the original are serviceable, if mostly just reminders of their animated equivalents, the majority if not all of which are superior, especially visually. “Part of Your World” is the clear standout of these covers, carried solely by Halle Bailey’s transcendent performance that’s the only instance in this movie of anyone successfully taking a song from the original and making it their own.
Speaking of Bailey, she is one of if not the main reasons to see this movie, capturing the spirit of what has made Ariel such a beloved Disney Princess for so long without straight-up copying the animated version’s mannerisms. If there is any justice in this world, this movie will skyrocket her to stardom, and she’ll avoid becoming the next Mena Massoud (star of the 2019 Aladdin remake) struggling to get roles after such a big breakout. Jonah Hauer-King’s Prince Eric performance will hopefully be a good launchpad for him as well, as he is able to bring quite a bit of depth to a character that’s notoriously one of the most bland princes in all of animated Disneydom.
The rest of the performances are, for the most part, serviceable without being particularly noteworthy. (I would say Awkwafina’s Scuttle is the best of the voiceover-only ones, but after her musical number, I may have to revoke that claim.) Most of them just seem to be trying to be close to their animated counterparts without deviating much from them, and while they could hardly be blamed after adaptational changes in certain other Disney live-action remakes ended up getting a ton of flack from fans, it becomes a glaring reminder of this film’s status as a nostalgia cash-in and little else.
Like some of the other Disney live-action remakes such as The Jungle Book (which is still the best of the lot thus far), The Little Mermaid is at its best when it deviates from the original, and while watching that second act I couldn’t help but think it could be really fun to see an all-new movie based on this story with all the scenes changed (maybe it could even still be a musical, just with different songs). Unfortunately, I suspect that while that sort of thing can fly with stories like Peter Pan and Cinderella, The Little Mermaid is one of the ones that society has just too strongly tied to the Disney version for any other iteration of the tale to be widely accepted at this point, especially coming from Disney itself.
Think back to when the studio announced that Mulan – another story that existed prior to its animated Disney adaptation — would get a live-action version without the songs. (Yes, the quality of that film turned out to not be so great, but I suspect audiences would have largely rejected it even if it were a good movie that simply opted to stick closer to the original Chinese legend than the animated Disney version.) It likely would have been a similar story had Disney pulled something like that with The Little Mermaid yielding closer to the original Hans Christian Andersen tale (not that Disney would ever allow Ariel to die).
All this to say, this live-action Little Mermaid isn’t a bad movie. It just mostly exists as a reminder of the original, and while audiences wouldn’t accept anything less than that, the real shame isn’t that they also probably wouldn’t accept anything more.
SCORE: 6.5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 6.5 equates to “Decent.” It fails to reach its full potential and is a run-of-the-mill experience.
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