The Lit­tle Mermaid

At this point, the only phrase more bone-chill­ing than ​“Suel­la Braver­man pol­i­cy” is ​“Dis­ney live-action remake”. Sludgy, ugly, point­less ways to squeeze every last bit of cash out of over-tired par­ents and Dis­ney adults with nos­tal­gia for when their imag­i­na­tion was cap­tured by beau­ti­ful­ly craft­ed, hand-drawn ani­ma­tion and a litany of orig­i­nal­ly com­posed bops. While The Lit­tle Mer­maid sur­pass­es recent art­less remakes of The Lion King and Aladdin, that is a very low bar to clear. Halle Bai­ley is fan­tas­tic as Ariel, and Dav­eed Dig­gs delight­ful as Sebas­t­ian the crab, but it’s still a late-stage cap­i­tal­ism slog.

Bloat­ed from the original’s 83 min­utes to 135, the hour mark pass­es before Ariel and the sea witch Ursu­la even meet and make a deal to exchange her voice for 3 days on land, to get true love’s kiss before sun­set, or sub­mit to being Ursula’s pos­ses­sion. Even with Bailey’s charms and eupho­nious ren­di­tion of ​‘Part Of Your World’, it’s hard not to long for some sort of lunar eclipse loop­hole to make things get a bloody move on.

The padded-out details are all so incon­se­quen­tial or strange: that Titan and Ursu­la are sib­lings, that a human killed Ariel’s moth­er, and that Prince Eric’s moth­er is try­ing to ban him from the sea as Titan tries to deny Ariel from the land. A bizarre amount of run­time is giv­en to a geopo­lit­i­cal dis­pute around ship­wrecks. Land peo­ple blame the sea gods for mak­ing the sea so inhos­pitable to them that their ships are all being wrecked, while the mer­peo­ple are furi­ous that the ship­wreck debris is dam­ag­ing the reef, think­ing the humans are doing it on pur­pose. It’s clear that a vague eco-mes­sage about pro­tect­ing the sea seemed worth insert­ing, but wish­ing the humans would stop lit­ter­ing the trop­i­cal seas with all their dead bod­ies is such an odd choice.

Speak­ing of trop­i­cal seas, this is very much the Caribbean, not Den­mark, like the Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen orig­i­nal or the vague Europe of the ani­mat­ed fea­ture. While cast­ing Halle Bai­ley as a Black Ariel raised some eye­brows, and debat­ing the race of a char­ac­ter that is half fish is a task for the bow­els of the inter­net, trans­pos­ing the action to the ear­ly 19^th cen­tu­ry in the Caribbean is a wild choice.

The nobil­i­ty all have Eng­lish accents (includ­ing his Black moth­er, white Prince Eric is adopt­ed, because sure), while the locals have Caribbean accents, drink from coconuts and play steel drums. There’s some­thing unin­ten­tion­al­ly hilar­i­ous to hav­ing our lit­tle Black mer­maid falling in love with a hand­some Prince who talks end­less­ly about increas­ing the Caribbean island’s trade with Por­tu­gal and Brazil because, erm… what are you trad­ing there, buddy?

Titan him­self has 7 daugh­ters, each of a dif­fer­ent race, ​“one from each of the 7 seas”, and I guess one of the ways ​“it’s bet­ter down where it’s wet­ter” is pro­gres­sive views about polyamory. But the mer­maid sis­ters are each stun­ning­ly realised, and the beloved musi­cal num­ber ​‘Under The Sea’ is gor­geous, bright and colour­ful with swirling octo­pus­es, jel­ly­fish, neon coral and the wit­ty lyrics of ​“What do they got? A lot of sand. We got a hot crus­tacean band.” But it’s still a reminder of what we once had: craft and cre­ativ­i­ty that made gen­er­a­tions of young peo­ple want to befriend a lit­tle crab rhap­so­dis­ing about a mag­i­cal world under the waves, where now we’re trapped in much murki­er waters.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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