135 min | PG | May 26, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures
Disney drains its 1989 animated classic into a literal live-action remake, with Halle Bailey under the sea as Ariel. The songs survive. The wonder does not.
Ariel is a mermaid princess who trades her voice to a sea witch for human legs and a shot at a prince. The story is the same one Disney told in 1989, beat for beat, song for song. This version asks a simple question and never answers it. What does a hand-drawn fantasy gain by being rendered as photoreal flesh and water? The film is a fifteen-million-dollar argument that the original needed more reverb and longer hallways.
Halle Bailey carries the film as Ariel with a voice that earns every second it occupies the screen. Her “Part of Your World” lands because she sings it like a person who actually wants something. Melissa McCarthy plays Ursula as a drag-inflected villain who chews the few practical sets she gets. Javier Bardem plays King Triton with a stiffness that suggests he never quite found the character under the digital tail. Daveed Diggs voices Sebastian with energy the animation cannot match, and Jonah Hauer-King plays Prince Eric as a pleasant blank the script forgets to develop.
Rob Marshall directs from David Magee’s screenplay, and the underwater photography is the central failure. The CGI fish and coral float in a murky blue soup that swallows color and contrast. Faces lose detail in the haze, and the talking sea creatures land in the uncanny valley where realism kills personality. Marshall stages the musical numbers with a flatness that betrays his stage roots, and the new Lin-Manuel Miranda songs interrupt the pacing rather than drive it. The film looks expensive and reads dim.
This is a competent karaoke cover of a better film. Bailey is a genuine discovery and the reason to watch. Everything around her is dragged down by a literalism that confuses photoreal with beautiful. The animated Ariel swam through a world that color and motion could invent. This Ariel swims through a server farm’s idea of the ocean, and the magic drowns somewhere in the render.