The Little Mermaid came out approximately three months to the day, so the fact that I’m seeing it in theaters at all gives you a sense of how desperate AMC is to have anything to put on its screens in the third month of the actor’s strike, with the reports of every major film pushing back deeper and deeper still into 2024 and 2025. It was technically billed as a sing-along screening and as of a few days my live-in gremlin and I were the only people in the theater, so I invited Friend and her children to come see it with us. She responded positively when I texted her: “Oh cool! I missed this when it first came out!” which is what I had thought as well when I saw that it was returning to theaters for this weekend only. I had read the headlines about how it was the victim of being a bad movie that people correctly identified as bad, and I also remembered that it was a live action remake which made it sort of the most forgettable type of film, but Frozen went so well with the gremlin last week that she has not stopped interrupting our daily listening of the PBS News Hour to demand “Reindeer song” and “Snowman” that I’m actually kind of desperate to have a new earworm in the house for all our sakes.
I didn’t realize that this 2 hour long movie was going to be so boring that my demon would literally rather throw herself down the stairs than sit through whatever Eric’s “Wild Uncharted Waters” is about. She protested starting around the first hour mark, which is about when I think any reasonable person should, and as far as I can tell the best part of this movie–besides the completely effed up shizz that Ursula does at the end when she takes human form just to mess with the person she just claimed to help by marrying her true love using a form of hypnosis (yikes and double yikes when you catfish your niece’s boyfriend using her voice)–is any moment with a dog, which is few. There’s a bizarre “song” in the first act AFTER(?) Ariel has lost her voice where she sings (??) but only inside her head (???) when she’s looking at all the human shit she can see once she has legs. Their date is also pretty cute.
TLM is going to make you worry about whether Javier Bardem is doing OK and whether Ariel and Eric are ever going to have kids. Also why didn’t Trident turn people in humans way way way more often and how can he and Ursula be related holy shit there’s so much left to
UPDATE: (Aug 30) Was just listening to the soundtrack for the umpteenth time since seeing this movie and really think there’s a missed opportunity in not giving Ursula a second song once she transforms.
