BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

This isn’t helped by the film’s gaudy and obnoxious look. It isn’t as grotesquely over-designed as ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (2010) but it’s not far off. There’s so much visual detail in this film that it quickly starts to become overwhelming, and you can’t shake the feeling that the film is more concerned with dazzling you with spectacle than telling a good story. The enormity of its "Frenchness" becomes a never-ending distraction, its execution so verbose that it would make Marie Antoinette dizzy. Almost everything about the visual approach is flat and uninspired, and I walked out with no lasting images or impressions of its look or texture other than a headache.

But nothing comes close to the catastrophe that is the music. All of the singing (and I mean all of the singing) has been so badly auto-tuned that it sounds tinny and genuinely painful, robbing all the lyrical performances of any soul or humanity. Alan Menken has done the inconceivable and re-orchestrated possibly the greatest songs and score ever written for an animated film, making them as big and opulent as possible to the point where they are actually incoherent. All the songs are a rhythmic, tonal mess, and the new songs are so awful that you’ve forgotten about them almost as soon as they’ve begun. My heart dropped further and further with each song, culminating in a scene that typifies everything wrong with this film - the ballroom sequence. What was a cinematic icon is now a rhythmic, tonal, visual, aural and creative vacuum of nothingness, infuriating in its absolute banality.

There are a few moments of hope though - Watson and Stevens are lovely when not singing, and have a gentle chemistry that works, especially coupled with some of the added material which ends up succeeding. Luke Evans is great as Gaston, clearly having a ball, and the animation for the enchanted objects is extraordinary. The problem isn’t the talent on screen, but how they and their characters are being treated.

And this brings us to LeFou. There has been a lot of talk about this being Disney’s first openly gay character, but LeFou is so underwritten and handled with such cowardice that even if you’re looking for it, you’ll barely see it. After going on so much about it in the press, it filled me with bile to see that this fact they are so self-congratulatory about - and which they believe earns them some kind of praise for queer representation on-screen - is basically a rehash of the "sissy" in a production code-era musical comedy. Then again, maybe they think we’re grateful for this outdated scrap they’re throwing us.

It’s impossible for me to really look at ‘Beauty and the Beast’ with objective eyes. The original is a film I have always cherished and adored. But even removing the personal, there’s still very little to admire in this soulless, obnoxious remake. Everything about its approach is lazy and ignorant, expecting its audience to overlook the fact the film has no soul at all and revel in all the nostalgic nods it throws at them. In a way, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is everything wrong with this recent obsession with nostalgia, an obsession they are determined to cash in on without putting in the effort. As a Disney fan, I am insulted that they expected this to be good enough. I’m insulted that they’ve taken a source material of real intelligence and treated it with token levels of respect. I’m insulted that they think a half-second moment is enough to earn kudos for queer representation. But worst of all, even with the gaudy design and terrible handling of the music and lack of genuine soul, the final film is just dull. I’d be more upset about it if it weren’t so thoroughly forgettable. It does not justify its extended running time or millions of dollars, or even its very existence. In the end, just like most of their live-action fairytales and remakes, this new ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is just bloated, loud, pointless and boring. They shouldn't have even bothered.