ALADDIN.
(ORIGINALLY POSTED ON LETTERBOXD - 27/06/2019)
CUT TO: Written reviews.

I got a headache from the amount of times I rolled my eyes in this viewing. Bland, lifeless and completely deprived of any joy pretty much sums up my feelings towards Disney's 2019 botched remake of Aladdin.
Can't help but also feel that this would have been so much more enjoyable if this wan't a musical, whenever a character started singing the film came to a screeching halt, and all it did was make me want to watch the '92 original so I could hear the same songs but infinitely better.
Everyone excluding Will Smith lacked any charisma or enthusiasm to make any of the characters stand out. Jafar was downright awful, and as soon as he became "the most powerful being in the universe" towards the end I got instant flashbacks to CG The Rock from The Mummy Returns.
The sets and costumes felt extremely fake and it was as if I was watching a staged production of Aladdin instead of being immersed into the world they were trying to build. The CGI was unbelievably noticeable, and there is a lot of it to notice. The pacing made it feel longer than Love Exposure, and that film is literally 4 hours long.
Would've much preferred if the film was more like a Guy Ritchie adaptation of the story of Aladdin (similar to what he did with Sherlock Holmes) instead of what we got, which was just the lifeless skin of the 1992 original.
The fact Guy Ritchie made this before doing Sherlock Holmes 3 is a goddamn tragedy.