https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805647/
This movie was released in 2020 at HBO max, and I got excited because it is a remake of a 1990s classic from my childhood. And it had the wonderful Anne Hathaway as the main witch. And come on! Guillermo del Toro is on the writing team. However, I didn't have HBO max, I am already paying for tons of subscriptions so, what else I could do? It was also weird when it was removed from the HBO catalog and people were saying it was a flap.
Recently it became available at Netflix, so I took the chance and let's see, maybe the people were too severe with the movie. But they weren't. I don't know, but maybe I was expecting too much about a just entertaining movie for spare time?
They changed a bit the story, now it is normal in the industry to change ethnicity in the remakes, but that wasn't a big problem. In the 90's classic, it was a nerdy white boy, and now it was a black boy that was the lead. He was fine in the movie didn't change anything in movie. And it was cool because the adult version of himself that was doing the narration of the events was Chris Rock, which is an actor that I like a lot, despite that problem with Will Smith. But we only hear his voice in the movie. So the mainly premise is that witches exist and they hate children, they want to exterminate them and during the movie, they had an incredible idea how to do that. Luckily, 3 children, led by our protagonist fought against them.
The change of ethnicity didn't bother me at all like I said, but another thing in the movie changed a lot! In the classic movie the witches makeover scared me a lot, it was very ugly, I remember not sleeping well for days. Now they replaced the ugly makeover with a ridiculous CGI effect. They exaggerated so much in the CGI that it lost the essence of reality in the ugliness, maybe you guys can give you the opinion about that:
the old school witch: screenshot from www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrjLNpfDTi0
the new version witch: https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3636761/anne-hathaway-flashes-gnarly-pennywise-smile-new-look-witches/
Re-watching the convention part from the old movie and comparing with Anne Hathaway acting, I guess she mainly copied the old version witch, that's is amazing, but of course, the CGI affected I guess my whole judgment, it made me laugh a bit.
The story was mostly the same but in the end I had that feeling of "meh" in the end. I am doing this review only because I felt important to make it. Should you avoid it ? I don't think so, If you watched the original movie, please go advised to watch that it is a "meh" remake. If you didn't watch the first version, it is a fun story.Here is the trailer
