The Media Tourist

Going ‘under the sea’ with Disney’s latest live-action version of an animated classic

The Little Mermaid
Starring Halle Bailey, Melissa McCarthy, Jonah Hauer-King and Javier Bardem
Directed by Rob Marshall
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, May 26

Disney’s beloved fish-out-of-water tale makes a splashy return in this highly anticipated live-action, all-star remake about a spunky aqua teen who longs to be part of the human world.

Like its 1989 animated predecessor, it’s based loosely on a 19^th century Danish fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson. But mermaids—half human, half fish—were swimming around the far-flung pools of pop culture for centuries before that, and the new movie taps into the ancient fantasy and fascination with these alluring mythical creatures and their addictive siren song, which can supposedly lure sailors to doom and death.

It becomes the latest in Disney’s modern-era march of revisionist cinema since the 1990s, putting live actors alongside hi-tech digital effects for remakes of its “cartoon” movies, including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo, 101 Dalmatians, The Lion King and Mulan.

And it also becomes one of the best.

Newcomer Halle Bailey is Ariel, fascinated with what goes on above sea’s surface, a place she is forbidden to go by her hyper-protective father, King Titan (Javier Bardem). But when curiosity gets the best of her and she pokes her head out of the waves for a peek, she ends up rescuing a young prince (Jonah Hauer-King) from drowning during a dramatic nighttime shipwreck, hauling the unconscious seafarer onto a beach and serenading him before disappearing again into the water.

That sets things into high gear, as Prince Eric tries to reconnect with the alluring mystery creature that saved his life and Ariel makes a deal with the conniving sea witch Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) to trade her tailfin for feet. But there’s a catch: Ariel must give up her enchanted siren-song voice and share a kiss of “true love” with Eric within three days, or she’ll be consigned to the depths of the ocean forever.

Melissa McCarthy is Ursula

Comic relief is provided by the flappy, yappy seagull Scuttle (voiced, in a gender switch from the previously animated role, by Awkwafina) and the crab Sebastian (Daveed Diggs), a loyal attendant in the royal court of King Triton. Jacob Tremblay (from Room) is the voice of the little sidekick fish Flounder.

Broadway virtuoso Lin-Manuel Miranda (one of the film’s dozen producers) wrote three new songs and tweaked the lyrics of a couple of others (“Kiss the Girl” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls”) for the new movie, reflecting a commendable next-gen sensitivity to issues of female empowerment and consent. But unless you’re a Little Mermaid superfan, and you’re paying super close attention, you might not even notice—or care that a couple of other tunes in the animated version (“Les Poissons” and “Daughters of Triton”) got the hook.

But you will thrill to the movie’s well-known, iconic soundtrack standouts, given tremendous new zap as underwater, computer-enhanced, razzly-dazzly production numbers—reflecting not only Miranda’s buoyant Broadway roots, but also those of director Rob Marshall, a former theatrical producer and choreographer who went on to make music-filled movies including Chicago, Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns. “Under the Sea” is a joyous, calypso-flavored aqua chorus line, with dozens of dancing, prancing sea critters; “Part of Your World” gets new emotionally enhanced wallop and human resonance.

And you’ll be rocked by the stupendous performance by 23-year-old Halle Bailey. The Grammy-nominated pop singer and TV actor (from Grown-ish) gives a star-making movie turn as a splendid Disney princess-to-be who makes you feel the heartfelt tug of her big dreams of discovering what’s out there—and up there. Melissa McCarthy practically steals the show as Ursula, hamming it up with a flourish of florescent octopus tentacles, cackling over her bubbling cauldron of sinister spells and plotting to take over the undersea world. English actor Hauer-King has a bit of resemblance to Ryan Gosling, making me drift away for a couple of fanciful moments thinking about The Little Mermaid going ashore in La La Land. And Javier Bardem, so menacing in No Country for Old Men, looks regally right-on as a bearded, bad-ass, big-kahuna submariner.

It’s about a couple of young people falling in love, of course—in a risky, forbidden, boundary-crossing inter-species relationship, with disapproving parental figures. Think Romeo and Juliet, tossed in the tide and spritzed with ocean mist. The new Little Mermaid leans into its timely theme of cultural differences and societal riffs, as both merfolk and humans inherently distrust, and even hate what’s on the other side of the thin membrane of “border” that separates them.  

But hey, let’s don’t get heavy. Dive into this new Mermaid, a delightful, thoroughly entertaining, refreshingly impressive upgrade, a terrific new take on an animated classic, respectful to the Disney original but with vibrant new jolts of movie magic, drama, danger, spectacle, joy, yearning, wit and romance.

Plus an important mega-message for little girls and young women everywhere and anywhere: In the water, on the land, in a seashell or a castle—like Ariel, if you can dream it, you can do it.

This summer, is everything really “better down where it’s wetter”? So far, yes, it is!

—Neil Pond

Marvel’s cosmic misfits return for an overstuffed blowout farewell party

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Baustista, Karen Gillan & Will Poulter
Directed by James Gunn
PG-13

In theaters Friday, May 5, 2023

The gang’s all here as Marvel’s motley crew of cosmic outlaws closes out their movie trilogy with a bang in a daring dash to save one of their own. This big, bold rousing finish (supposedly) is the overcrowded end of the franchise, which began nearly a decade ago and now hinges on the backstory of Rocket, the genetically modified wisecracking racoon (voiced again by Bradley Cooper).

The Guardians quip, banter and rip across the universe, encountering an array of bizarro cyborg critters and a crazed despot (Shakespearean actor Chuckwudi Iwuji, deliciously, devilishly nasty) intent on creating a new, perfected world—and discarding all his “mistakes” along the way.

Vol. 3 throws a lot at the screen—a barrage of digital effects, a who’s who of characters and a dense stream of details. If you haven’t been along for the ride from the beginning, paying attention through the other Guardians flicks, the events of The Avengers and the interwoven connectedness of the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe, well, good luck. You might not understand how the green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana), who died in a previous movie, can show up again, and have no memory that she and Guardians leader Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) were once lovey-dovey.

As diehard Marvel fans know, there’s always the chance of new beginnings and redo’s, thanks to time warps, Infinity Stones and other comic-book shenanigans.

Just about everyone is aboard for this way-out wrap party. There’s Drax the Destroyer (former wrestler Dave Bautista); Gamora’s sister Nebula (Karen Gillan); Mantis (Pom Klementieff), whose enhanced ability for empathy comes in handy. Groot, the size-shifting, virtually indestructible humanoid tree, is voiced again by Vin Diesel, even though he grunts only one thing (“I am Groot”) over and over.

Look: There’s Sylvester Stallone, back again! And Elizabeth Debicki! Will Poulter makes the movie debut of a golden-hued, artificially fashioned space super-dude, Adam Warlock, whose comic-book roots go back to the 1960s. And Cosmo the telepathic dog has a new voice—it’s Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, who got an Oscar nomination for playing Borat’s daughter in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Returning director James Gunn’s brother, Sean, also returns as a humanoid alien with a mohawk fin on his head and a whistle-controlled arrow in his quiver.

There more than a few space-age shootouts with all kinds of zappers and blasters, and even a high-tech version of an old standby, the hand grenade. But nothing blows up like the heated moment when one of characters drops the F-bomb, marking an onscreen first for a Marvel movie.

At one point, the Guardians plop down in a comically mutated surburbia that looks like Ozzie and Harriett spliced with The Twilight Zone. Is that Howard the Duck, the waterfowl star of Marvel’s first feature-length theatrical movie (1986), playing a card game? Be quick or you’ll miss a visual shoutout to Alf, the sitcom space alien. To top it all off, there’s a climactic rescue of a bunch of cute kids, who look like ragged theater waifs abandoned after being worked to the bone in back-to-back productions of Cats and Les Miserable.

It’s a mega-movie loaded with wildly colorful characters, oddball creatures, monsters and cuddly pets, loads of whimsy and jokes, bursts of dramatic intensity, lushly detailed world-building and ka-boomy blasts of explosive, expensive-looking, sometimes chaotic action. But there’s also a surprising amount of emotional heft and heart, particularly in the sentimental swell of Rocket’s early days when he was experimentally bioengineered alongside other “altered” caged animals. If those TV PSAs for animal-cruelty prevention really get to you, you’ll be wrecked by watching what went down with Rocket and his penned-in pals. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.  

And you’ll certainly tap your toes to the soundtrack, a highly curated playlist loaded once again with scene-appropriate tunes by the Flaming Lips, Heart, Faith No More, Alice Cooper, the Beastie Boys, Florence and the Machine, Bruce Springsteen and X. The movie opens, fittingly, with Radiohead’s “Creep”—and Rocket muttering along to the lyrics, about being a self-loathing “freak” and “weirdo”—and closes with a bouncy, upbeat Poco tune that will be familiar to fans of the first movie, back in 2014.

If this is, indeed, the final Guardians mission, they go down swinging (and swearing!). But rest assured, you’ll be seeing these characters—or some of them, anyway—in other Marvel projects, in some form or another. This may be a goodbye, but these Marvel space seeds were also engineered to grow, made to be movie perennials, sewn to sprout—to regenerate like the roots and branches of Groot—over and over, returning again and again.

—Neil Pond