Review of Aladdin (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

Aladdin is a remake that no one asked for that delivers on some promises of being more inclusive in its casting, more musically faithful to its animated sibling than previous reboots have been, and trying hard to make some changes to the cringey ending of the animated movie. As happy as it would make me to join the bandwagon of contrarian **** for this one, I’m mostly fine with thinking about this movie as one of the purer but boring incarnations of Disney’s plan to soak nostalgic 90s children.

The update trips over itself to give Jasmine, Genie, and Jasmine’s handmaid Dalia, played by the wonderfully straight-faced Nasim Pedrad, fuller internal lives and agency. Some of that is welcome, like the side story between Dalia and Genie, which works a lot better than it ever could have with the otherwise superior Robin Williams at the helm. Will Smith can pull off the flirty, dashing, smoothness necessary to woo in a way that would not have played as convincingly with Robin’s more brittle, nervous energy. Aladdin and Jasmine are aged up: the actors are 26 and 27 rather than the teenagers of the animated version of the story, which solves some borderline behavior on Jafar’s part. But other things, like Jasmine’s song, feel empty of feeling and out of place with the rest of the film, probably because they were not meant for the film, but rather for play on the radio and Disney channel. There’s nothing wrong with including new music. (Wife has a note about the impressive quality of Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott’s singing and how the movie would’ve been much improved if the producers had allowed Will Smith to lip sync some of his more vocally challenging songs, rather than the Lin-Manuel Miranda-type sing-talking that he does.).

Jasmine herself is spared the indignities of inconsistently effective hypnotism, which apparently necessitates a chase scene by a parrot-dragon instead. In the end, she’s still placed in suspended animation for the big confrontation scene which makes me wonder what Anita Sarkeesian would say about the effectiveness of this update: Feminist Frequency’s Damsel in Distress series.

Wife describes this film as “completely unnecessary,” made the same attempts to update and address feminist critique to the story as they did in Beauty and the Beast, such as explaining the mother’s disappearance, since so many people have made fun of Disney for the “missing mother” problem. Wife likes, for instance, the way that Jasmine is included in the opening song, “One Jump Ahead,” rather than it only featuring Aladdin. But she says the new Jasmine song was not a worthy addition to Menken’s soundtrack. The dancing was one of the few aspects of the film that distinguished it from the original (something I agree with–dancing and singing are not points of spectacle in an animated feature, but live-action can hang its hat on the actor’s physicality).

One of Wife’s points of mild annoyance is Genie’s inconsistent power levels. Sometimes it seems like he has a lot of leeway, like when he magics an entire entourage of performers to accompany Prince Ali to Agrabah, yet he’s unable to make Aladdin a prince from a real place, or to make a fake place real for the purposes of a wish. This is especially important when Jafar makes his wish to be sultan, but Genie isn’t able (or maybe willing?) to make the court and court guards obey him. The wish is almost too-quickly overcome by a simple monologue by Jasmine, simperingly (my word) extolling the virtues of her father’s beneficent hereditary monarchy over the evils of another hereditary monarchy. Overall, she says, it was just OK, an entertaining way to spend two hours, but it doesn’t have the charm and fuzzies of the original, which is a shame.

Lindsay Ellis has an amazing video essay on the impact of Robin Williams on celebrity-driven animated movies in the 90s through the present day.