TLM-2023 - May 26

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. I would rather talk to you about tigers or some similar creatures, but let us talk about the TLM-2023 movie remake instead.

Basically, it works. It is not the best movie of 2023, but it works. It is not the most remarkable or the most memorable, but neither is it the most horrid film of 2023. Anything else?

Ok, there is the species-changing operation of Scuttle – the bird changed from a male seagull into a female northern gannet. It is the same principle as changing Eric into Ariel or vice versa – these are two different seabird species and they are not really related to each other at all – you could just as easily replace humans with dogs, horses, or elephant in TLM-2023 – the basic principle would be the same.

With geography, it is the same mess as it is with biology – initially, Disney’s TLM franchise was based on Andersen’s fairy tale, which was set in the North Sea – but now Disney is proclaiming that their original TLM movie was set in the Mediterranean instead, and the remake is set either there or in the Caribbean. Yay.

Again, this mess is completely unnecessary, as is changing a bird’s species – does it really matter if Eric and Ariel live in northern Europe, in southern, or across the world in Central America? They are imaginary characters, for crying aloud! …But since the same question could be asked about the film itself – did the TLM really needed to be remade? It had spawned one or two movie sequels, as well as a TV cartoon spinoff already – but that Disney franchise became completely upended as well.

Getting back to characters… Disney did not really deliver anything good with them either. So, Ursula really is Ariel’s aunt – so, how did she end up with tentacles? Is she a mutant, or has the High Evolutionary, (the MCU version), had a hand in her transformation? Ariel was the one to end her rather than Eric? Great, more gender misbalance in Hollywood – Barbie and Ken are going to go down great!..

No, seriously, have you seen the trailer for the Barbie movie? It is all about girl power, about the titular doll character going into ‘the real world’ (such as it is in the film) and learning… something or other. This is an old trope, one of the first characters to do this sort of thing had been Buddha, the deity behind Buddhism, but Barbie is no deity, and whatever she is going to teach her audience will not be any new modern Buddhism. Rather, the cast and crew behind it are going for a new Pinocchio film, the wooden boy replaced by a plastic girl… and her sidekick, Ken, who – in the trailer at least – seems to be about as helpful and coherent as Ariel’s animal sidekicks are, (and that leaving behind the chemistry either between Diggs and Awkwafina, or between their characters), and can you imagine a modern film, where a male character goes on a true character development, and a female character is a comic relief? Well, I cannot, but we digress.

No, not really – these days the TLM remake is all about Ariel going out and about, learning who she is and embracing herself… just Disney’s Pinocchio remake had been. Del Toro’s take on the wooden puppet is something else entirely, so let us leave it off to the side for now, and we are left with what?

..Aside from a lame-ass excuse that Awkwafina’s character changed species to become a diving bird so that she would take to Ariel and friends underwater – seriously, it is a world with mermaids and who knows what else, why a seagull cannot dive here? – there is the odd reluctant of featuring Ms. J. Alexander, who played Vanessa, Ursula’s alter-ego. For a while I thought that Ms. McCarthy would just play Vanessa herself – Eric was in love with her only through a spell to begin with, who cares if ‘Vanessa’ looked like Ms. McCarthy without CGI and make-up – but no. This might have been too risky; plus Ms. McCarthy, (Ursula), and Ms. Bailey (Ariel) are too different from each other as people, so, again, we get Ms. Alexander as Vanessa and no particular reason as to why she did not appear in the trailers. What is left?

Nothing of any significance. The queen – Eric’s mother – is the same actress who played the grown-up Hermione Granger-Weasley in the original HPCC theater production. That… might’ve been one of the reasons as to why HPCC didn’t succeed – Ms. Dumezweni and her male counterpart, who’d played the adult Ron Weasley didn’t look anything like Hermione and Ron; they just as easily could’ve been a pair of OCs who got caught in the latest Potter and friends’ madness – but that story is over. The story of TLM-2023 also probably is – while it was received better than HPCC was, it is not by much. People may be invested, and investing, into the TLM franchise, moreso than they had into the DnD film – and hah, was not that painful – but not by much. We will just have to wait and see as to what will come out of this in the future, immediate and otherwise, instead.

This is it for now. See you all soon.