I went to see Aladdin during half-term and I really
loved it. Below is The Guardian’s take on the new release…
Aladdin
review – live-action
remake really takes flight
4/5stars4
out of 5 stars.
Guy Ritchie’s adaptation is lively, colourful and genuinely funny – making
only judicious tweaks to the original, it’s thankfully not a whole new world
The
scimitars are out for Disney’s live-action Aladdin, what with the enduring
fondness for the original (not least Robin Williams’ Genie) and the botched unveiling of Will
Smith as his successor in an early trailer that presented him as a creepy, half-naked blue guy
from the uncanny valley. Director and co-writer Guy Ritchie is hardly a
seal of quality these days, either, following flops The Man from UNCLE and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. But sheathe your weapons because this new Aladdin
is actually great fun.
It is far from perfect,
but where many recent fantasias have crumpled under the weight of their special
effects (Tim Burton’s Dumbo, for one), this one really takes flight. It is lively, colourful and genuinely funny, and doesn’t
break what didn’t need fixing about the original. As one character remarks of
Aladdin’s early attempts at romance: it’s “clumsy but in a charming sort of way”.
Any Hollywood movie
set in a fantasy Arab kingdom is going to have its issues, but Disney has
sought to avoid the ethnic stereotyping that marred its 1992 animation. For
starters, the cast are brown-skinned actors (all the voice actors in the
original were white). Egyptian-Canadian Mena Massoud brings the requisite
roguish charm to Aladdin himself, the street rat with a heart of gold, Princess
Jasmine is played by Naomi Scott, a British actor of Indian descent, and
Dutch-Tunisian Marwan Kenzari is the villain Jafar. There’s also a European
prince, played by Billy Magnussen, who’s treated more like a recurring gag.
But we all know the
main draw here is the
blue-skinned guy. It has felt like Will Smith’s mojo really is trapped
inside a lamp, after what seems like a decade of miserable and self-important
“serious” roles which reached their nadir with After Earth and
Collateral Beauty. Smith seizes his chance to let it out again and do what he
does best. His Genie is less cartoonishly manic than Williams’; more human, you
could say. But he’s still the life of the party: part-Queer Eye makeover guru, part-Siri in human form,
part-romcom best buddy – with perhaps a touch of Hitch, the professional
matchmaker Smith played in 2005. His assistance with Aladdin’s clumsy attempts
to woo Jasmine is the movie’s comic engine, but in a judicious tweak to the
original, the Genie also gets a love interest, in the form of Jasmine’s servant
Darla, played by Nasim Pedrad, who gets a few good comic lines of her own.
Jasmine herself is
given a few extras to amp up her agency, not least a Let It Go-style power ballad,
Speechless, to proclaim how she’s not just going to stand aside and take all
this like a passive princess. Scott carries the song well but it comes a little
too late in proceedings to make an impact, if we are being honest, and many of
the musical interludes feel like unnecessary interruptions. More successful is
a grand, carnivalesque street procession, with hordes of dancers, wild animals,
and Aladdin astride a
giant flower-covered camel float, and an athletic, Bollywood-style ballroom dance; both
are full of colour and energy. In terms of cultural references, this theme-park
“Arabia” setting is all over the place – drawing on influences from Morocco to
Turkey to India (with barely an overt reference to Islam to be seen). You could
say it’s still an
idealised Orientalist fantasy, but it comes across more as respectful
representation than reckless appropriation.
On the whole,
Ritchie’s adaptation wisely does little except add human flesh to the bare
bones of what was always one of Disney’s strongest stories (if you need a plot
summary you must have been living in a cave for the last 1,000 years). It still
holds up as a tale whose central couple’s deceptions and entrapments and
self-discoveries have a pleasing symmetry to them, and whose “it’s what’s
inside that counts” morals are in the right place. That’s really all anyone wanted out of a new
Aladdin: not a whole new world, just a slightly updated old one.
Points for
discussion
Notice that in this review, the writer
does not explain the plot at all, claiming that “if you need a plot summary you must have been living in a cave for the
last 1,000 years”. The writer assumes that we know the plot and so instead just
gives opinions. As in the reviews of A Monster Calls yesterday, the opinions
are expressed through:
-
Expanded noun phrases
-
Adjectives
and adverbs to express opinion
I In
this review, the writer also uses puns (play on words) to express his
viewpoint. Look at where I have highlighted these.
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