Tag: Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Summerland (2020)

Gemma Arterton is a misanthrope with a buried heart of gold in Summerland

Director: Jessica Swale

Cast: Gemma Arterton (Alice Lamb), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Vera), Penelope Wilton (Older Alice), Tom Courtenay (Mr Sullivan), Lucas Bond (Frank)

As London is suffering under the Blitz, in a sunny village in Kent reclusive writer Alice Lamb (Gemma Arterton) has her world turned upside down when she is forced to take in young evacuee Frank (Lucas Bond). Depressed and lonely after the collapse of her relationship with the glamourous Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) at college, Alice has shut herself off and leads a solitary life. So it surprises her when she finds her heart thawing for Frank – though not as much as she will be by other revelations.

Jessica Swale has a successful career as a playwright. Several of her plays look at the place of women in history. Blue Stockings was a fascinating (and highly popular) story of female undergraduates in the late Victorian era, smart enough to excel academically but seen as second-class citizens in Cambridge. Nell Gwyn rehabilitated Charles II’s mistress as an intelligent and caring woman and a talented writer and actress. Summerland follows some of these themes – focusing on a lonely lesbian in the 1940s who, with her unconventional interests and academic leanings, is out of touch with her time. But Summerland softens this up by covering the whole story in a dreamy, luscious warmth where everything works out fine and acceptance and reconciliation is the name of the game. It’s both far less interesting than Swale’s stage work and also just as enjoyable.

Not there’s anything wrong with a a bit of cosiness in film. But Summerland is so relentlessly feel-good you end up missing a little bit of bite. Could there not be one character who questions Alice’s sexuality (which even by the 1970s, where Penelope Wilton plays an older version of the character, was hardly welcomed with open arms)? Surely in this seaside town of Kent there would be whisperings of a sort around the village’s multicultural population? Would the colour of Vera’s skin cause no comment from anyone at Cambridge or elsewhere? There are darker societal issues that could have been explored here that just aren’t touched on. I suspect the film is going for a “colour blind” casting, which works in theatre and with older time periods, but seems a bit more awkward when applied to a time period when race was a very real issue. You’d get a ton more social commentary from an episode of Call the Midwife which somehow feels a bit wrong.

But then the film isn’t trying to make a social comment, but is trying to be a bit of escapism. On that score it works very well indeed. With gorgeous Kent scenery, wartime Britain looks like the sort of idyllic Sunday tea-time drama-land you’d love to live in. The fundamental decency of everyone is somehow rather reassuring – even town gossip and busybody Sian Phillips has a heart of gold – and the film bubbles along through a series of events that are both utterly predictable (and at times hugely implausible) and also strangely reassuring. Because you could figure out most of the film early on, you never need worry.

It’s given a great deal of energy by Gemma Arterton’s performance of bad-tempered misanthropy, which of course hides great reservoirs of love and warmth for humanity. Arterton has some beautiful comic timing (an early scene where it appears she is using a ration coupon to buy chocolate for a child without coupons, only to trouser it herself is perfectly done, and probably the film’s highpoint) but also really succeeds in demonstrating the emotional trauma and pain Alice is experiencing. There is a beautiful lightness about how she opens up to Frank (scenes that are of course hugely predictable but still delivered with a genuineness and sweetness that really works).

The flashbacks allow a sun-kissed romance between Alice and Vera to play out, and leave enough questions to keep us guessing (for a bit) as to how this relationship failed to flower. (Needless to say, despite a brief line about flying in the face of society, we never see for a fraction of a second that anyone has any problem with this completely public relationship). Vera is warmly played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who brings a radiant life to the part. (A fun moment for Swale watchers – Arterton and Mbatha-Raw both played Nell Gwyn in Swale’s play.)

Summerland throws in a bit of thematic depth around a hunt for Fata Morgana mirages – the focus of Alice’s latest book – and the possibility that these cloud-based mirages of castles carry some sort of spiritual message from the afterlife. But this also serves as part of the film’s easy solving of problems. Any obstructions to the characters’ happiness are swept aside, either by not being mentioned or by the narrative swooping in (one offscreen “character” is easily dispatched, so that we feel no conflicted guilt at their existence getting in the way of the resolution). But this is a film that is offering a light, simple, gentle, escapist story. Nothing remotely challenging – or even really hugely dynamic – happens in it, but for those looking for Covid escape, Swale’s escapist, sweet film debut is worth a look.

Misbehaviour (2020)

What price progress in Misbehaviour?

Director: Philipa Lowthorpe

Cast: Keira Knightley (Sally Alexander), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Jennifer Hosten, Miss Grenada), Jessie Buckley (Jo Robinson), Greg Kinnear (Bob Hope), Lesley Manville (Dolores Hope), Rhys Ifans (Eric Morley), Keeley Hawes (Julia Morley), Phyllis Logan (Evelyn Alexander), Loreece Harrison (Pearl Jansen, Miss Africa South), Clara Rosager (Marjorie Johansson, Miss Sweden), Suki Waterhouse (Sandra Wolsfield, Miss USA), John Heffernan (Gareth Stedman Jones)

In 1970, the Miss World Competition in London was disrupted before a world-wide TV audience by Women’s Liberation campaigners, furious at the competition being the public face of a world that judged women on appearance rather than personality. The disruption was led by post-graduate UCL student Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) and commune radical Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley), and rather overshadowed for many the fact that, for the first time in history, black female competitors like Miss Grenada Jennifer Hoosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) were treated as genuine contenders for the title. Misbehaviour recreates all this wonderfully, but also makes an intriguing exploration of the different ways women can make themselves a place in the world.

It would have been very easy for Philipa Lowthorpe’s engaging film to have designated villains – after all with the casual sexism and objectification of the Miss World competition, you could easily have assigned the competition runners as baddies. Instead the film is richer than that, full of people who genuinely feel they are doing their best in the roles they’ve been given in life. If there is a villain, it’s society itself which traps women into certain roles, and doesn’t allow them to grow.

The film follows three plot lines – the women’s liberation movement, the background of staging the Miss World Competition, and the lives and expectations of the contestants themselves. Of these three plots, the women’s liberation movement is surprisingly the least engaging. Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley do decent jobs, but their characters are more one-dimensional and lack real development (they start the film as passionate rebels and end the film the same way), with this lack of plot being padded out by movie clichés of the “you’re off the protest” variety. 

The real interest surprisingly is the competitors themselves. Like the protestors, the film is keen to not blame the contestants. The ones we follow are smart, intelligent, passionate women who are, by and large, willing to play the game to get their future ambitions realised. We see this most of all for Miss Grenada and Miss “Africa South” (a black South African shoe-horned into the competition to counter accusations of legitimising apartheid): the competition places them in the position of representing victimised minorities, groups that have their options sharply restricted. Having spent their lives being told that only being white, blonde and blue-eyed is beautiful, the chance to set an example to others is important to them – and the film doesn’t downplay or demean this at all.

This is captured particularly in the exploration of Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Miss Grenada, Jennifer Hoosten. A woman willing to use the competition as a springboard to try and build herself a professional career, she is an intelligent and dedicated woman who understands the nature of her competition. Hoosten however rejects being positioned as a victim, as well as the way Women’s Liberation crams all women’s aims into a single homogenous goal. Why should another group of women tell her what is best for her – isn’t that what men have been doing all her life? As a black woman, her only way to get the opportunities that someone like Sally Alexander has – education and career – is to play the hand that nature has given her the only way she can. Mbatha-Raw captures this all extremely well in a quietly judged and affecting performance.

Similar feelings motivate the rest of the competitors. Miss Africa South (an engaging Loreece Harrison) just wants to keep her head down and get home to her family, letting her presence alone make her statements. Miss Sweden (a fiery Clara Rosager) rails against the control and management of the organisers on every aspect of her life while at the competition. It’s a film where women are working to find their place in the world, but accepting that not all those goals will be the same. Keeley Hawes does excellent work as Julia Morley (co-runner of the competition with her husband, a brash Rhys Ifans), a woman trying her best to reform the competition from within.

Lowthorpe juggles these interesting themes – giving oxygen to all these points of view – within a fascinatingly precise reconstruction of the competition itself and the protest. As part of this Greg Kinnear contributes a spot-on performance as Bob Hope, here a sexist comedian from a different era who can’t understand the changing world. The film gets a lot of comic mileage as well from the jaw-dropping sexism of the BBC coverage and the drooling perviness of the reporters rushing to interview the competitors.

“This isn’t the end of anything, but this could be a start” says Lesley Manville in her waspishly delightful cameo as Hope’s wife. She’s right, the world didn’t change overnight. But as the film captures it started getting people thinking, even if it accepted that not all women will have the same view. Sally Alexander and her mother can disagree on women’s roles – “Why would I want to grow up like you?” Sally berates her housewife mother (very well played by Phyllis Logan) – but the two characters can still come together and agree that having opportunities is still better than not. And perhaps that’s what the film is arguing for: all these women are stretching for opportunities. And if that means the world needs to change so half the population gets the same chances as the other half, so be it.

Concussion (2015)

Will Smith takes on the NFL in solid but uninspired true-life story Concussion

Director: Peter Landesman

Cast: Will Smith (Dr Bennet Omalu), Alec Baldwin (Dr Julian Bailes), Albert Brooks (Dr Cyril Wecht), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Prema Mutiso), David Morse (Mike Webster), Arliss Howard (Dr Joseph Maroon), Mike O’Malley (Daniel Sullivan), Eddie Marsan (Dr Steven T DeKosky), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Dave Duerson), Stephen Moyer (Dr Ron Hamilton), Richard T Jones (Andre Waters), Paul Reiser (Elliot Pellman), Luke Wilson (Roger Goodell)

In 2002, Pittsburgh pathologist Dr Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) carried out an autopsy on deceased former Pittsburgh Steelers centre (and American Football legend) Mike Webster (David Morse). What he discovered – that the high speed impacts of American football massively increased the chances of players suffering serious brain damage and debilitating mental conditions – was to change his life, and lead to a six-year battle to get his research acknowledged by the NFL. This film dramatizes this story – with the obligatory inventions and dramatic changes (Landesman describes the film as “emotionally true” if not “factually true”).

Concussion is a fairly straight-forward, rather uninspired “one man’s struggle” kind of film. There isn’t much in it, to be honest, that is particularly unique or different from films of this type we’ve seen before. We’ve pretty much all seen the trope of a man pushing to get himself heard against the scorn, disbelief and anger of those who need to hear him the most. Does Concussionadd anything new to that? No not really.

Peter Landesman shoots the film with a methodical, workmanship that hits all the expected beats. The whole film plays like Michael Mann’s The Insider-lite: with the difference that the NFL never really convinces as an actual threat in the way Big Tobacco does in that film. The film falls over itself to repeatedly tell us how powerful the NFL is but never really shows us in the film how that power might work. When the FBI drum up charges against Omalu’s mentor, you never get the sense that this is being directed by the NFL themselves. They are simply never that dangerous an opponent.

Maybe because this is a film that doesn’t want to run the risk of saying America’s beloved sport is dangerous. It wants to blame bad eggs rather than an institutional failure – hence the repurposing of former player Dave Duerson as a sort of braggart bully. The characters playing the NFL heads are relegated to TV screens in the corner. It never wants to really look at the risks of this institution wilfully burying evidence their sport is dangerous, or question whether this sport is even a good idea. Throughout the world of sport, there are ungoing debates about the health risks of sport, from the danger of heart conditions to early onset dementia in football players from heading the ball. This film fails to really tap into any of this.

As such, there isn’t really any dramatic force behind the film: it doesn’t manage to suggest Omalu is in danger and it doesn’t want to turn the NFL into actual antagonists. It treads a weary middle ground. If the NFL was really positioned as a threat, then the pervasive presence of its stadium in Pittsburgh would be sinister. It isn’t for all Landesman tries to shoot it in that way.

Despite this though, Will Smith is very good as Omalu. The film’s version of the doctor seems a little different from the quirky, socially awkward real-life Omalu. But Smith nails the home-run scenes of Omalu raging at his research being disregarded. (In real life it was easy for the NFL to dismiss Omalu by using his Nigerian heritage (his ‘otherness’) quietly against him. The film doesn’t touch upon this by the way.) Smith has all the charisma the role needs and brings it a certain James-Stewartish moral decency.

The rest of the cast don’t get much else to play with. Alec Baldwin is pretty good as a former NFL doctor trying to ease his conscience (although his accent got some criticism). Gugu Mbatha-Raw has a fairly thankless role as the supportive wife, but does it well. Albert Brooks might be a bit too much at times as Cyril Wecht, but David Morse plays Mike Webster with sensitivity.

The film is not always that subtle. Shots of Webster haunting Omalu are a bit much. Omalu’s unhappiness and frustration are telegraphed using familiar clichés, from raging impotently at stony faced law officers, to trashing a room in his still-under-construction dream home in Pittsburgh (having read the source book it’s hard to believe the real Omalu ever did something like this). The timeline of the film isn’t always clear. There is a little too much lingering on funerals and tear-stained relatives for easy emotional hits.

The main issue is that Concussiondoes nothing special and doesn’t manage to make its familiar structure feel particularly fresh. It’s just a very, very familiar type of story told with no real unique imagination. Although Smith is very good, it’s not quite enough.

Belle (2013)


Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the mixed race daughter making waves in society in Amma Asante’s underwhelming pseudo-historical film Belle

Director: Amma Asante

Cast: Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Dido Elizabeth Belle), Tom Wilkinson (William Murray, Lord Mansfield), Sam Reid (John Davinier), Emily Watson (Lady Elizabeth Mansfield), Sarah Gadon (Lady Elizabeth Murray), Miranda Richardson (Lady Ashford), Penelope Wilton (Lady Mary Murray), Tom Felton (James Ashford), James Norton (Oliver Ashford), Matthew Goode (Captain Sir John Lindsay), Alex Jennings (Lord Ashford)

The British film industry produces a constant stream of costume dramas, many covering alarmingly similar ground on the aristocracy or wealthy of the Georgian period onwards. It’s to be commended then that Belle takes a similar plot, but from a radically different direction. Here, a famous real painting of a white and mixed-race pair of ladies becomes the jumping off point for a drama about an illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a wealthy family.

Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is the daughter of naval captain and a slave in the West Indies. After his death, she his raised by her uncle William Murray (Tom Wilkinson), Earl of Mansfield, and his wife (Emily Watson) to raise her as their own alongside their niece Elizabeth (Sarah Gadron). Belle is treated as an equal among the family, but is not allowed to dine with guests or move freely in society. However, Belle has inherited a fortune from her father – unlike Elizabeth – and quickly finds herself a source of interest from the younger sons of the nobility. Meanwhile Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, is asked to rule on the slave ship Zorg case (where slavers threw their slaves overboard in a storm), a case that brings passionate abolitionist John Davinier (Sam Reid) into Belle’s life and makes her start to re-evaluate society’s attitude to her.

Belle is a formulaic costume drama, given an imaginative twist by placing a black woman at its heart. It explores issues around the imbalanced attitudes of British society at the time (and since), and the hypocrisy and racism that bubbles under the surface of the British gentry. Belle is rejected by all and sundry – until knowledge of her wealth becomes known, at which point many of these objections are choked back to secure her money. The film gets much mileage out of Belle slowly comparing her position first to the black servants around her and then to the slaves who lost their lives on the Zorg.

However, what undermines Belle is that it is a work of fiction – and it feels like it’s hiding it. What we do know about the real Belle (which isn’t much) doesn’t relate at all to what we see in the film. She wasn’t an heiress. She didn’t fall in love with an abolitionist lawyer – Davinier was not the aspiring son of a cleric, but a French steward. Elizabeth probably wasn’t a penniless relative. Mansfield’s credentials as a proto-Abolitionist and reformer were never in doubt – by the time of the Zorg case he had already passed a ruling 10 years earlier that there was no basis for slavery in British law. Belle actually lived in Mansfield’s house until his death as effectively a housekeeper and semi-secretary (the very fate she rejects in the film). The film’s lack of interest in historical fact even affects small details – at one point James Norton’s pleasant but empty Oliver boasts his father has purchased him a commission as a Captain in the Navy, virtually the only institution in Georgian England which promoted solely on merit! (This annoyed me a lot more than it should have.) 

Belle is not a true story by a long stretch – but that doesn’t stop it proclaiming a “what happened next” series of captions at the end. It could have got away with this in a way other non-historical films have, if its story itself was more compelling. But instead Belle offers a merely serviceable story, offering a unique prospective on the aristocracy but largely using it to tell a fairly conventional “love across the social divide” story. Honestly, for large chunks of the film you could replace Belle with any slightly shameful second daughter, and the story would remain largely the same.

Which is a shame because it feels like it wastes something really interesting – and also wastes Mbatha-Raw’s star-making turn. She is excellent – sweet and naïve, but growing in confidence, determination and wisdom, gaining the strength of will to shape her own destiny. The film introduces interesting themes as Belle begins to question the attitudes of her family – do they accept her because they must? Would they be as open to a black stranger? – but these themes don’t quite coalesce into something really solid and coherent. Instead they are trotted out, but we don’t really feel we learn anything.

Similarly, the case of the slave ship Zorg seems rather loosely defined. We don’t get a real sense of public pressure or interest in the case, or really understand the essentials of what the case involved. Instead, it’s used primarily as a tool to question the attitudes of Lord Mansfield, and whether he has the ability to expand his obvious love for Belle into a wider statement of man’s equality. Tom Wilkinson is very good as Mansfield – prickly, but essentially decent and caring under a gruff surface – even if the role can hardly be a challenge for him. But the film doesn’t really manage to make a really compelling argument about what it is trying to say, other than slavery is of course bad.

Elsewhere, the film takes simple shots and shoots fish in the barrel. The Ashton family are introduced to stand in for British society. Lord Ashton is brisk and businesslike and interested only in maintaining the status quo. Lady Ashton – played by Miranda Richardson at her most coldly standoffish – only cares about securing wealth for sons. Of those sons, James Norton gets the most interesting part as the decent but shallow Oliver. Poor Tom Felton though: his character might as well be Draco Malfoy in period costume, all but spitting out ‘Mudblood’ at Belle. None of these performances offer anything different from what we’ve seen before.

That’s part of the problem with Belle – it wastes an interesting idea by slowly turning it into a more conventional story, primarily focused on who is Belle going to marry, rather than the implications of a black woman in a racist society, or the hypocrisy of that society being only willing to accept her when she has money. Despite some good acting – Penelope Wilton and Emily Watson also give tender performances – and a star-turn in the lead, it’s not really that interesting a film. You keep expecting it to burst into life, but it never does: for such a film offering a fresh perspective on history, you don’t feel like you’ve learned anything new about Georgian society at the end of it.

Beauty and the Beast (2017)


Dan Stevens and Emma Watson faithfully recreate almost shot-by-shot a much better cartoon

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Emma Watson (Belle), Dan Stevens (The Beast), Luke Evans (Gaston), Kevin Kline (Maurice), Josh Gad (LeFou), Ewan McGregor (Lumiere), Stanley Tucci (Maestro Cadenza), Ian McKellen (Cogsworth), Audra McDonald (Madame de Garderobe), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Plumette), Hattie Morahan (Agathe)

hhBeauty and the Beast was released at the perfect time. The generation who grew up watching the original could now take their children – or revisit the fond memories with their parents. It was a chance for everyone to wallow in sentimental nostalgia. Disney knew its market would be people who wanted something as close as possible to what they remembered: they certainly delivered.

Surely you know the story by now? But in case you’ve been living under a rock for your entire life: Belle (Emma Watson) is the beautiful but bookish village girl who dreams of a something more than this provincial life. When her father Maurice (Kevin Kline) is imprisoned by a horrific Beast, Belle volunteers to take his place and stays in the castle. The Beast and all his servants are enchanted and only true love can break the spell – will Belle and the Beast fall in love?

I would ask why Disney feels the need to make what are effectively shot-by-shot remakes of their animated classics, but the fact this raked in almost a billion dollars at the box office kinda answers that question. But make no mistake, creatively this is karaoke: a few small flourishes have been thrown in, but effectively it’s a faithful recreation of a film that was already pretty much perfect to begin with. In fact, watching it, the only real emotion I felt was a desire to watch the “real” thing again. Damningly, twice my wife and I stopped to look up the equivalent scenes from the original on YouTube: in every case they were better.

That’s the big problem. Of all these remakes, only The Jungle Book was a genuine reimagining of the original. This one follows Cinderella and hews as close as possible to the film you’ve already seen. The plot is identical. The song and dance sequences are the same. The characterisations are the same. Hell, half the line readings are the same. It’s a film that is so dependent on people’s affection for the original that it’s terrified of offering anything too different from it. In which case – why not just watch the original? Would you rather look at a poster or the actual Mona Lisa?

Condon has thrown in some new pieces here and there to get an extra 30 minutes of action. One decent invention does involve the spell also causing the villagers to forget the castle exists, which is neat. The others add less. Belle has been turned into as much of an inventor as her father and, in one particularly bizarre sequence, invents the washing machine. There is a rather confused sequence involving a magic book which allows the Beast to go anywhere in the world (the witch clearly left a plethora of magic devices behind to entertain the Beast) – raising the question of why he needs that enchanted mirror, since he can apparently physically travel through both space and time with his Tardis-book. LeFou is subtly reimagined as gay – but this is very quietly done so as not to damage the film’s box-office potential in some markets.

There is a rather clumsily done storyline around Belle’s mother dying of plague when she was a baby, which also adds nothing. The film may possibly be trying to construct some kind of clunky commonality between the Beast and Belle with their parental traumas, but a dead mother with a rose fetish shares little with the stereotypical Cold Abusive Aristocrat father the Beast has – and anyway, they’re already giving them plenty of common ground through the good stuff they’ve lifted straight from the original film. Nothing else new really stands out.

In fact, the film is so studiously faithful, you get annoyed when it deviates from the original – particularly as it invariably does scenes less well. The final battle between Gaston and the Beast suffers horribly, with the emotional narrative of the fight thoroughly muddled, in contrast with the original’s clear and efficient storytelling. In the original, the Beast despairs and refuses to save himself from Gaston’s attack until he sees Belle. Here, he’s sort of defending himself and sort of not, and Belle is given some action nonsense, and Gaston’s death is turned from a clean narrative (one treacherous thrust hits home, then in sadistically going for the second he falls to his death) into a strange sequence where he stands and brutally shoots at the Beast repeatedly until the stonework beneath him randomly collapses and send him plummeting to his doom.

None of this, however, compares to the butchering of the moment when Belle discovers the library. In the original this is an endearingly sweet moment, with the Beast overcome with excitement at giving Belle a gift she really wants. The audience shares in his delight, and is charmed by his touching anxiety that she will like it, just as they share in her wonder at the discovery. It’s a major moment in the growth of their relationship. Here it’s thrown away – the Beast shows her the library in a fit of irritation at her pedestrian Shakespeare tastes. The film gives all the time and emotional weight to the tedious “magic book” sequence, where they travel to the “Paris of my childhood” and discover that, yup, Belle’s mum died of plague. Well that was both depressing and uninteresting…

Anyway – take a look at those two library scenes…

The acting is pretty good. Emma Watson does a decent job, particularly considering the pressure on her. She performs the songs prettily, although they don’t soar the way they did when performed by someone with the vocal power of Paige O’Hara. Her Belle is thoughtful but has a level of defiance and independence that’s been stepped up from the original. Dan Steven’s Beast is much more of a prince under a ghastly shell – unlike the original he’s literate, can dance and is well spoken (which makes his moments of animalism and his soup eating failure stick out all the more). The rest of the cast are fine – Ewan McGregor is as flamboyant as you’d expect, Emma Thompson sings the song very well, Kevin Kline makes a lot of Maurice. However for each of them, there are moments when you remember fondly that the animators invested the originals with more emotion.

The one member of the cast who does stand out is Luke Evans. How is the guy not a star yet? Sure the swaggering braggart Gaston might be the best part in the whole film, but Evans nails it with all the energy and egotism you would expect. His scenes are the best in the film by far, and he’s the only one who manages to do something a little different with his role.

Of course it looks fabulous, but it feels somehow a little bit empty. All the things that move you are done (mostly better) in the original – in fact, a major part of why they move you is the memory of the original. The acting is pretty good and it’s well filmed and made – the design is terrific. But honestly, with the original out there what’s the point? Why would you watch this rather than the other one? It’s not as moving, it’s not as exciting, it’s not as funny, it’s not as charming. All it does is to try and recreate the original as closely as possible. You can stage Hamlet thousands of times and each production would be different, but Disney can’t stage Beauty and the Beast twice without replicating it.

If you want it to exactly match your memories, without being quite as good, it’s the film for you. If you want a Disney live-action film that feels like something original, watch The Jungle Book.