A Rant/Review of Beauty and the Beast 2017.

I was originally intending this to be a few lines in an upcoming piece titled "Thoughts on some movies I've seen recently but haven't said as much as I want to about" where I give my brief to semi-brief thoughts on some movies I've watched recently (update: now out, click the title to see it). But, as you can see, I really had some feelings about this movie. I kind of write with the assumption that you've seen the 1991 Disney animated version. If not, the Wikipedia article here (the Plot subsection in particular) should be plentiful. Anyway, the rest is the real rant/review and I make no apologies for it.

Who was this movie for? Who was asking for this?
Apparently people wanted it and liked it, though, because it made ONE POINT TWO SIX BILLION DOLLARS. That absolutely astounds me, because I thought the movie was a pale recreation of the original, at best, and absolutely pointless at worst.

Starting with the casting, I think Emma Watson was horribly miscast, and I'm sorry girl but your singing voice was awful. Her performance was just beige. There was nothing special or interesting about it at all. I don't understand what they were going for here except just that she's popular.
To be fair, Dan Stevens's voice work as The Beast was great. The CGI work was often atrocious, particularly when The Beast's fur was wet. It looked like something from the early 2000's, and that's pretty bad for your big budget 2017 film. But that's not Mr. Steven's fault, and he was fine.

Most changes to the story and characters were completely pointless at best, and stupid at worst. Making Maurice a music-box maker, fine. Making him into a cloud-cookoo-lander was stupid. In the original he's the bumbling professor trope. Absent-minded and occasionally clumsy, but intelligent (if maybe only in one particular field). In the remake he just as often acts like an idiot as not, and acts completely inappropriately for the situations he's in. Its like he switches between being serious and being in another movie at random. It was utterly bizarre. Kevin Kline is, ya know, an alright actor, so I don't think it was his fault, but he was awful.

LeFou being gay was a complete non-issue. I'm only mentioning it because apparently there was a big stink made over his supposed gayness. Apparently it didn't hurt the box office though, because holy eff 1.26 billion dollars, for this? What was dumb about LeFou was the movie's strange desire to make him into a good-guy. They don't go all the way with it, but instead of leading the mob at the end, he's basically saying Gaston is going off the rails. There were a couple other little things that I don't specifically recall but I remember thinking "Why are they trying so hard to make him so sympathetic?" My theory: They didn't want to make him gay but then still have him evil for fear of backlash. That, combined with him being played by Josh Gad, who also voices Olaf from Frozen, and they didn't want to make Olaf evil. They played it safe.

Luke Evans as Gaston is... fine. His performance was alright, but he's no where close to "roughly the size of a barge". If you're going to make him visually more realistic by casting a realistic looking person, then either change the movie more to make that make sense, or cast someone who is super built. Dave Bautista has better taste than to do a movie like this, but he's roughly the correct body size. Or the Rock. That said, like I mentioned, I didn't hate his performance. It was maybe a little over-the-top at times, but that lines up with the rest of the movie being very cartoonish. I know, its a remake of the 1991 animated version, but forgive me if thinking a live-action remake should differentiate itself somehow.

Instead of going line-by-line through the rest of the cast, let me just say that I think casting Ian McKellan, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, and Emma Thompson as the servant/furniture characters was stunt casting and nothing more. They were all fine. I think they're all excellent in other films. But did they bring anything to this aside from a name? No.
Idea. Cast French people in your movie that takes place in France? Not just for the servant character's either, for everyone. In fact, now that I'm on that subject, why are so many of them British? I know I said let's not go line by line, but **** it, I'm going line by line with this. Watson, Brit. McGregor, Scottish. McKellan, Brit. Thompson, Brit. Stevens, Brit. Evans, Welsh. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is also in it, and is British.
There are some Americans as well, like Stanley Tucci and Audra McDonald.
The first French person I could find in the credits is Rafaëlle Cohen who plays one of the three "Bimbettes" characters. The trio of girls who all want Gaston, and no their role is not expanded here. They are as useless. The other two are Carla Nella, who as best as I can tell from my short research is based in London and is British, and Sophie Reid, who is from Brighton and is obviously therefore BRITISH.
So, I guess France is populated almost entirely by the British. Great casting choices. Great, safe casting choices.

Here's a big change they made to the story: They gave it a real world to exist in. Gaston isn't just some random big hunter dude who lives in this random village, he's a veteran from the war, who thrived in chaos and battle and has a dark side that wants to come out and relive those days. This is good. Putting that character in a Disney movie that daren't stray too far from the source material and therefore still comes across as a G-rated cartoon is NOT good. He just doesn't work. I think Luke Evans would be a good choice for that role in a different movie. Like I said he was fine, but then the movie pulls him back and doesn't let the depth that backstory should lend.
He does attempt to kill Maurice in this movie, but in the most family friendly way I can imagine. Gaston and LeFou tie Maurice up to a tree and leave him there (let me clarify that the reality of that situation would be horrendous, but in this movie it [like everything else] comes off as cartoonish and silly). He's obviously discovered and saved. This does nothing for the story and feels just like padding to me. So in the end, nothing came of any of this. It was changed, it was added, and it amounted to absolutely nothing except to extend the run-time of the film.

Another thing giving the story a place in the real-world does is inform Belle and Maurice's backstory. The way this was handled was, in my opinion, probably the biggest misstep of the film. So, Belle doesn't remember her mother. Its implied she's dead. Fine. More or less exactly like the original cartoon version.
Belle is curious about her mother, and has some association with roses and her mother. Dad doesn't talk about it.
So, this is a plot thread that is brought up, and it must be resolved somewhere. The writer or the executives or whoever decided that they needed this storyline, and we needed to get some back-story on Belle's mom. In order to resolve this plot-line, what do you do? Perhaps in a tender moment, her father tells Belle what happened to her mom? He grows as a character, they grow together, blah blah whatever.
No. Beast has a magic book in the library that can LITERALLY TELEPORT YOU TO ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Wait, excuse me, WHAT? How does this not break everything in the story?? Beast says it's the "worst part of the curse" because he can technically go anywhere, but because he's an ugly-ass beast he can't actually explore or enjoy any of those places. Are you serious movie? The whole plot is based on the fact that he's a hermit who has shut himself in, both figuratively and LITERALLY, and it takes Belle to draw him out of the Beast and become the Prince he once was again.

They use this book to go to Paris, to Belle's childhood home, and find a plague doctor mask there. Oh no! Mommy died of plague! Mommy gave baby Belle a rose! How sad!
And then they completely ignore this for the rest of the movie. It informs nothing. Neither Belle nor Beast grow from this revelation. Nothing in the plot changes. It moves nothing forward. It was completely and totally unnecessary. Why did you put this in your movie?

Later, Beast shows Belle the magic mirror that allows you to see anywhere in the world. She uses it to see her father, and sees that Gaston and the townsfolk are sending him to an asylum. Alright, sure, makes sense (because it was from the original cartoon). She says she wants to go to him. Great. Good. Fine. Use the book.

Oh wait, no? Not use the book? The magical artifact that can teleport you literally anywhere in the world? Instead of that, you'll use the horse and ride through wolf-infested forest?

MOVIE, PLEASE. If you introduce an incredibly powerful tool like a magic teleporting book, you can't just ignore that later and expect everything to still make sense! You can't ignore the implications of the magic book!
That's why I say this addition of backstory is the biggest misstep, because from some weird need to make the movie more real, they add elements that make it less real and destroy suspension of disbelief and should change everything, but change nothing.

Side note, while Belle is slowly, slowly running away from the castle Beast gets a musical number, and to my surprise, I thought it was actually good. The whole situation was stupid, but the song was well written and performed well.
Backing up a little, another thing that was good was making it explicit that the Beast is a big reader. It gives Beast and Belle something real to connect over, and makes their relationship work better. That was an alright change. It was relatively minor, but it makes their connection make more sense, so that's good.

Anyway, I'm done talking about this movie. I haven't touched on everything I could have, but I feel I've said enough.
Long story short, it was a waste. Very little of what they changed or added actually helped the movie in any way. Because of that, they both changed too much, and also didn't change enough. If you're going to make a live-action remake, then actually make it being in live-action mean something. Do something new. Have artistic integrity.

OR don't listen to me because your absolutely artistically vapid live-action remake of a good movie made over a billion dollars.