Well turns out the moon was blue when this film was released because wow was this a real misfire. I was left wondering if Tom Hanks was blackmailed into doing this film because he is so much better than this film.
And that is my first positive. I just love Tom Hanks and any film he is in is a pleasure to watch just for him. He does bring some nice charisma and joy with his scenes. There's are some nice performances also from Joseph Gordon Levitt, Luke Evans, the voice actor for Pinocchio himself etc. The acting is really good I will give it credit for that.
Now whilst there aren't many, there's one change in particular I did like and that was making Monstro a sea monster rather than a whale. When this film has talking foxes and crickets and transforming donkeys, a sea monster doesn't sound too far fetched so I did like that.
And in fairness I will say this is a watchable film. I don't think it's good but if anyone I know wanted to watch it, I wouldn't hate it all the way through. I can have a decent time whilst not liking it.
Now moving onto the negatives. Let's just the easy one out of the way. This film is a shot to shot remake with very little difference to the original. Because of this, it feels unnecessary and feels very uninspired. As someone who champions remakes, it really disappoints me when studios decide to remake a film by just translating the original shot by shot. It's so lazy and an obvious cash grab. If you're gonna remake a film, keep the main concept but change the story or tell it differently.
I've always felt the story of Pinocchio would make for a great horror film. If you really think about the original film and break it down, it's actually quite scary and has potential for a visually stunning horror film so I'd love to see that dome someday.
And because its shot for shot, it commits the same flaws I feel the original makes and first it feels a little overstuffed. It's longer so it's got time to spread the plotlines out more but it does still feel overstuffed.
Also one of the reasons I don't like the original Pinocchio is because i have never liked the donkey subplot. It's a very dark subplot for a kids film and I find it very distasteful but most of all, once Pinocchio escapes its forgotten about. So when Pinocchio is continuing with his journey, I'm still thinking about how the donkey subplot was never concluded and the remake does nothing to update or fix that. All it does is add a musical number which left me wondering what the point of that was.
Now moving onto a more technical side, this film is very weird to look at. What I mean by that is when you have Tom Hanks surrounded by CGI characters and odd looking green screens, it makes this film feel really weird to look at. Also whose idea was it to make Pinocchio look like a cartoon character? He looks nothing like a boy made out of wood. He looks like he was plucked from the original film and had updated animation added onto him.
But what really got to me about me was how this film ended. It really felt like director Robert Zemeckis gave up, stop the final scene and went home. The third act feels so incomplete and there's a couple of plot points which seem to set up the epilogue of the 3rd act which in retrospect just now feels abandoned.
Overall this film really felt like a misfire and it wouldn't surprise me if reports came out saying there were production troubles because I do got the feeling there may have been some interference with the film the more I think about it. It baffles me how Disney came release a film like this that just feels unspired and just pointless.
⭐️⭐️
