The Little Mermaid | Official Trailer

The Little Mermaid remake isn’t without its charms. It’s a colorful undersea adventure that allows for enough winking artificiality that it can sometimes feel like an overly elaborate stage production instead of an overly expensive tribute to nostalgia through a photorealistic lens. This should by all rights be a star-making turn for Halle Bailey, but that doesn’t overcome the film’s failure to find an artistically valid reason for its own existence. Its most iconic moments are borrowed and copied wholesale, serving as little more than a reminder of simpler days watching clamshell VHS tapes released from the Disney Vault. Maybe that’s enough for some people. But maybe, like Ariel, we should want more.

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The Little Mermaid opens in theaters on May 26