Movie Review: Aladdin (English)

A whole new world, or lost in translation? Aladdin, the live-action remake of the 1992 original, is at best a bland, stultifying rehash that goes through the motions. The familiarity is both an advantage and a clutch, a cash grab disguised as nostalgia that, while lavishly mounted and painstakingly crafted, is nothing but a lustreless carpet ride, its attempts to shoehorn a message on female empowerment with the subtlety of a sledgehammer coming off as more jarring than organic. The well-known rags to riches story — about a street rat who accidentally frees a genie from a lamp, eventually transforming him into a charming prince, but also becomes the target of an evil sorcerer who wants the lamp for his sinister designs — is retold with sufficient spectacle but at the expense of emotional substance, so much so that the new version tends to feel like a sensory overload than a solid example of good storytelling. It's far from a high-budgeted train wreck, the worst that can be said about Aladdin is that it's just mediocre, a largely unremarkable, mindless sea of CGI glitz. Entertaining and well-rendered, but creatively bankrupt and eventually forgettable, the remake is as pointless as the rest of Disney's recent remakes.