In 2019 Disney treated us to the "live-action" remake of its classic The Lion King, a film that offered absolutely nothing new to the story while also losing a lot of the charm thanks to the bizarre choice of taking a photo-realistic approach to the story. The movie made over a billion dollars though, so here we are with a prequel no one asked for, albeit directed by the incredibly talented Barry Jenkins.
The film opens on Simba leaving his daughter Kiara with Timon and Pumba, whose attempts at story time are thwarted when Rafiki shows up and tells her the story of her grandfather Mufasa. Thus we get to see the story of how Mufasa and Scar came to be, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.
While this obviously isn't an 'original' story as its story stems from The Lion King, I certainly found that a fresh narrative greatly benefitted this entry. While the 2019 film is beat for beat things we've seen before, this is something new even if we do know where the plot points will wind up. There are some very forced references and tidbits we just didn't need to know the backstory of, but for the most part I really enjoyed watching these characters come to be. I think Jenkins' history as a very intimate filmmaker helped this feel more genuine emotionally, with the characters and their relationships all having a tender quality to them that made me care about them a lot more than I expected.
The actually story is pretty uninteresting, offering a journey that feels like a whole lot of plot filler and villains that are just pretty lazy. The character arcs though worked well for me, so while I didn't care about the actual journey, I still enjoyed the ride. There were some moments that got a bit cringey in terms of referencing the original, but oh well.
The voice acting here I did find a bit hit or miss. Aaron Pierre is pretty good as Mufasa, and Kelvin Harrison Jr. takes a pretty cool turn as Taka/Scar starts to show his true colours, but aside from them no one really stuck out to me. Some are recast including Zazu, and that was one change that very much didn't work for me. Visually the film might be objectively a bit less polished than the last one, but there's a bit more animation in the character faces, making them less hyper-realistic but more emotive which I appreciated.
Did we need this movie? No, we absolutely did not. I hope Barry Jenkins made a good chunk of change for doing this and can get back to doing what he's great at though. And while I didn't need this, I did end up enjoying seeing the origins of these characters. No need to rush out to see this but it's a worthwhile watch. 3/5
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