Robert Zemeckis’s Pinocchio is pointless and poorly made: a prime example of why Disney should start rethinking its plans for its future live-action remakes.
Overall Score: 3/10
Image: Disney+
Will Disney ever stop with their live-action remakes? It’s not that I think that they’re all bad. In fact, I happen to like most of them. Nevertheless, I feel that the company really has to reconsider which of their classics need or don’t need to be remade, and the new Pinocchio, as you’ll come to see, is a perfect example of why that must happen.
All right, before I begin with my long list of complaints, I think it’s only fair if I give credit where credit’s due. Pinocchio gets off to a relatively strong start, and we’re quickly introduced to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jiminy Cricket. I have to say, I’m really impressed with Gordon-Levitt. He’s able to completely disappear into his role, and you really forget that it’s him until you see his name appear during the credits. Moving on, almost just as quickly, we meet Tom Hanks’s Geppetto. Like Gordon-Levitt, Hanks also shines during these first few moments, and he’ll likely break your heart — as he did mine — when he sings "When He Was Here with Me.”
Given how great Gordon-Levitt’s and Hanks’s performances are, you’d think that the rest of the movie would be ok. Sadly, however, the reality is that Pinocchio progressively gets worse and worse, ultimately cementing itself as a cheap knockoff of the film on which it was based. To explain what I mean, think of the original Pinocchio as Humpty Dumpty. Disney and director Robert Zemeckis have mishandled it, dropped it, and failed to figure out how to put it back together again.
Speaking of Zemeckis, I am shocked and disappointed by just how badly-directed Pinocchio is. To be fair, several other great directors have made bad or not-so-great movies (e.g. Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet), but Zemeckis’s work in Pinocchio certainly takes the cake. For instance, he rushes through the film, moving swiftly between scenes and plot points without actually doing all that much to develop any of them. As a result, much of Pinocchio feels hollow and altogether soulless. The way Zemeckis directs his actors too is terrible. In other words, despite having several talented cast members at his disposal, Zemeckis somehow gets most, if not all, of them — save for Tom Hanks and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — to deliver performances that come off as overly hammy and unnatural.
And yet, Zemeckis’s crimes don’t end there. Oh no, he also co-wrote Pinocchio’s script! “But Tian,” you might say, “surely it can’t be that bad.” Well, it is. Everything from the dialogue to the way most of the scenes play out feels odd and certain characters are altered for no apparent reason. For example, Monstro the whale is now, quite inexplicably, a whale-Kraken hybrid of sorts. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Coachman’s henchmen are now a set of very distracting smoke creatures. However, the biggest issue I have is with how Zemeckis changes the ending, which, to avoid spoiling anything, let’s just say doesn’t work. I get what he was trying to do and the message he was trying to get across, but because he doesn’t do the work of making you feel invested in his characters or developing the rest of the story, his conclusion simply falls flat and feels unearned. Look, I could go on about what Zemeckis does wrong, but instead, I’ll leave you with this question I’ve been constantly asking myself: “How on earth did Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and Cast Away, make something this awful?”
Okay, let’s move on to something else. Visually, Pinocchio is a mixed bag. For instance, some scenes look great and remind me of Bill Condon’s stunning remake of Beauty and the Beast, but there are also more than a few that look pretty bad, especially the ones that involve the use of CGI sets. The Pleasure Island sequence is what comes to mind, and you can clearly see that the various (and seemingly outdated) on-screen digital settings and elements used in it are utilized poorly and in a rather chaotic manner. Everything is all over the place, and for me, it was very confusing to watch. On a more positive note, however, most of the film’s CGI characters look fantastic (with Jiminy Cricket, in particular, being beautifully animated).
As for the score, Alan Silvestri once again delivers something great. Unfortunately, it’s just about as forgettable as the movie itself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Pinocchio’s score, it’s just that it never quite reaches the heights set by Silvestri’s other works (e.g. his scores for Forrest Gump and The Avengers) and it just doesn’t stick with you.
So, is this new Pinocchio really as bad as people say it is? In my opinion, yes, it is. In all fairness, to begin with, I was never really the biggest fan of the original. As a kid, it creeped the hell out of me and gave me nightmares. But just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s bad. Zemeckis’s version, on the other hand, is outright terrible, and what’s worse is that it never really justifies its existence, which points, I think, to a larger issue that’s been plaguing Disney: Quite a few of its existing and upcoming live-action adaptations of its classic films feel unnecessary. Ones like Dumbo, The Lion King, and now, Pinocchio, not only fail to live up to the movies they were based on, but also fail to make us see why we should care about them at all. And so instead of constantly churning out remake after remake, I’d argue that Disney would be better off carefully considering the necessity of remaking something before making plans to do so. After all, it’s like what people always say: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”
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