The Little Mermaid Spoiler Review: A Soggy Attempt At Modernizing A Classic

Remaking Disney's animated classics is a fool's errand, and yet a lucrative enough one that many filmmakers have tried their hand at it and mostly come up empty. So far, the only director to have moderate success at the task is indie darling David Lowery, who's batting two for two after this spring's underrated if flawed "Peter Pan and Wendy" and the 2016 family drama "Pete's Dragon." 

It's to Lowery's credit that in each case, he's tackled a pre-existing title that either has a checkered and controversial history ("Peter Pan") or boasts a small enough fanbase that redoing the entire story won't alienate too many people ("Pete's Dragon"). But if you step too far off the beaten path with remaking titles from Disney's Renaissance era of the 1980s and 1990s, you risk angering most viewers. (Consider the 2020 "Mulan," which takes the basic premise of a young Chinese woman impersonating a man to take her father's place in the army but removes anthropomorphized animals and the animated film's tuneful songs, and ends up feeling lifeless as a result.) The alternative: films like "The Little Mermaid," the latest Disney remake that purports to change things up with its source material, but really just elongates and dilutes what was so beloved to start with. That "The Little Mermaid" is not as terrible as the remakes of "The Lion King" or "Alice in Wonderland" may be true, but it doesn't make this film enjoyable.

The broad strokes of this version — written by David Magee and directed by Rob Marshall — are very much of a piece with the 1989 film that inspired its existence. There is a red-haired mermaid named Ariel (played now by Halle Bailey), who wants to defy her father King Triton (Javier Bardem) by traveling up to the "above world," aka dry land, and spending time with humans. On her first time above the surface, she spies the young Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) and falls for him. Despite the exhortations of her father, his majordomo Sebastian the crab (voiced by Daveed Diggs), and her friends Scuttle (Awkwafina) and Flounder (Jacob Tremblay), Ariel decides to make a pact with the sea witch Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) to get human legs for three days in the hopes of getting true love's kiss and becoming human permanently. But Ursula has some sneaky plans up her tentacles, as is the case with so many Disney villainesses.

The differences between the original film (83 minutes long) and this remake (135 minutes long) are less in the broad strokes and more about puffing up the periphery like a useless blowfish. In this film, while Eric is still a blandly attractive seafaring young man, he's more invested in driving trade routes to his adoptive home, which has been beset by various shipwrecks and has become unpalatable to other kingdoms. (Part of Eric's expanded characterization, yes, is that he's adopted, even though his mother the Queen — one of the few new characters — loves him like her own son.) Also, this time around, Ursula's axe to grind against Triton is made more specific, as we quickly learn that the two of them are estranged sister and brother. (Why it is that one of them is a large squid and the other is a merman is a mystery for the ages that will remain unsolved.) 

There are musical additions (and subtractions) too. Eric gets a new song, "Wild Uncharted Waters," which serves as one of a few ways in which award-winning filmmaker and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda contributes. (The song of Miranda's that is most of a piece with his past work is "The Scuttlebutt," in which Scuttle and Sebastian do a fast-paced rap about the events of the film. It's pretty painful.) But many of the musical changes are the aforementioned subtractions and speak to a larger issue. It's not just that "Poor Unfortunate Souls," Ursula's show-stopping number, has a chunk of its lyrics removed, specifically the section in which she acidly croons about how men prefer women who don't talk (a section full of bitterly satiric wit, which is apparently a level of humor mainstream films shouldn't be striving for now). It's that other songs, such as "Kiss the Girl," add in a couple of lyrics meant to soften any potential controversy implying that Eric might kiss Ariel without her consent. (Seeing Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman listed as composer and lyricist, followed by the phrase "New Lyrics By," is disturbing, to say the least, even with Miranda credited as such.)

At heart, the core issue of "The Little Mermaid" is who's behind the camera. Though he received a Best Director Oscar nomination for his adaptation of the musical "Chicago," Rob Marshall has spent most of his career making films with weak direction at best. The last four films he's made, all for Walt Disney Pictures, run the gamut from forgettable ("Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides") to painful ("Mary Poppins Returns"). As the fourth "Pirates of the Caribbean" film made clear, Marshall's background on the Broadway stage as a choreographer and director did not translate comfortably into working with CGI. And yet, inexplicably, he continues to be handed chances by Disney to prove his limited ability at that specific style of directing. "The Little Mermaid" does not represent a turn in the right direction. 

Though few aspects of the film qualify as lively, there is an increased level of comfort behind the camera when Ariel is on dry land, because Marshall appears to have shot some of these scenes on location, as opposed to a warehouse full of greenscreens. If your memory is long enough, you may recall that Disney recently released another big-budget film set in and around water: "Avatar: The Way of Water." It may be unfair to compare Rob Marshall to James Cameron, but considering that "The Little Mermaid" boasts a reported budget of a quarter-billion dollars, it is worth wondering why one filmmaker is unable to use that money to create reasonably believable underwater environments in which human faces appear, and the other makes it look remarkably realistic. "The Little Mermaid" is at its least unpleasant when Bailey, Bardem, and McCarthy's faces seem to hover next to the CGI bodies underneath them, uncomfortably evoking memories of the execrable film version of "Cats." 

But the effects alone being bad isn't the sole problem; the other part of it is something Marshall has inadvertently spoken to during the press tour. Though the 1989 version of "The Little Mermaid" boasts a handful of songs in a short runtime, not all of those songs survived the transition to live-action/CGI. One omitted song is "Les Poissons," a quick and daffily funny number in which a bloodthirsty chef tries his best to turn Sebastian into a crab cake; Marshall has made clear why, stating "it's literally a Saturday morning cartoon section." He further said in the same interview, "That was a wonderful animated concept, but like I said, we're in a different genre." (He may want to revisit the concept of a "genre," seeing as neither animation nor live-action are genres of film.)

Marshall talks about bringing the notion of realism to the world of the film in that same interview, which spotlights a fascinatingly wrongheaded approach that's not unique just to this film. Whether or not you hold "The Little Mermaid" (the 1989 version) in high regard, it must be noted that this is a story about a talking mermaid whose friends include a singing Jamaican crab and a Borscht Belt seagull, who gets turned into a human by a sea witch. This is not a story rooted in realism, nor is it meant to be. (The same was true of "The Lion King" and "Beauty and the Beast," and yet here we are.) 

The notion of introducing realism appears in even the most impossible places. "Under the Sea" is a perfect show-stopping Broadway-style song, with some of the most dexterous and playful lyrics in any film musical. In terms of the lyrics themselves, the version in this film is the same, and Diggs proved as one of the original stars of "Hamilton" that he knows his way around rapid-fire phrasings. But there is a cartoonish aspect to the original film's conception, with the various sea creatures playing musical instruments and others being animated to look like jazz performers. This time around, the sea creatures eventually crescendo into a synchronized dance, but with no instruments, making the lyric "We got a hot crustacean band" fall flat because ... they don't. 

All of the songs involve some level of CG in how they're presented this time around. The good news is that "Part of Your World," the big "I Want" song from Ariel, works the best. Bailey is undeniably the find of the film, a well-cast and winsome newcomer with a powerful voice and sincere charm. So she does her able best with "Part of Your World," introducing some differences between her performance and that of Jodi Benson in the 1989 film, without feeling like she's pushing too far beyond what anyone would expect out of Ariel. But she's constantly sabotaged by how Marshall and editor Wyatt Smith film and cut around her as she expresses her passion to walk among the world of the humans who live above.

The cast, by and large, tries their best (though Bailey is undoubtedly the best part, even during the lengthy stretch where she's voiceless). And "The Scuttlebutt" may be the most groan-inducing aspect of the film, closely followed by the slower pacing and expansion of moments that never needed that much more room to breathe in the animated version. "The Little Mermaid" could have been worse, it's true. At least in 2D, the finished product doesn't look nearly as poorly lit and visually incomprehensible as some of the clips implied when shared on social media. (When Ursula turns into a giant octopus in the climax, though, that very much is visually incomprehensible and almost entirely shrouded in darkness.) But giving a movie marks for not being as bad as possible is the same as giving someone a participation award. Could this have been worse? Of course, which also means it could have been a hell of a lot better. Maybe with a different director. Maybe with faster pacing. 

Or, hey, maybe if it was animated. That might have been a good idea too.