Mufasa: The Lion King review – A flawed but fitfully powerful CG prequel
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins adds currents of personality and style, but there's still a weird cognitive disconnect seeing photoreal big cats talking.
Iconic villains' origin stories are largely best left alone, or at least ambiguous. While Heath Ledger’s Joker mocked the idea of origins in The Dark Knight, Darth Vader might have been better off without his surly teenage years. With many such tales, the sense of an imposing figure being reduced to a mechanical box-ticking exercise lingers.
With that in mind, it’s impressive that director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and writer Jeff Nathanson make such an absorbing job of this flawed but fitfully powerful CG prequel to Jon Favreau’s The Lion King makeover.
In the age of the backstory, the film never fully shakes from its fur a sense that Scar’s villainy and Mufasa’s stature are diminished by bullet-point psychologies. But at least Jenkins gives his tale of brotherhood and betrayal currents of personality and style, aided by some springy songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda that extend the original’s legacy breezily.
The story introduces the idea of legacies – "He lives in you," indeed – swiftly. A framing device involves Simba (voiced by Donald Glover) and Nala’s (Beyoncé Knowles) daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter) hearing the tale of Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Scar-to-be Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr) from sagely mandrill Rafiki (John Kani). During a flood, a young Mufasa is swept from home, orphaned and saved by fellow cub Taka.
The two become brothers, thick as thieves as they grow and dream of finding a new home. But soon, a shared love for lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone) and a shared desire to be king – coupled with the machinations of embittered white "outsider" tiger Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) will drive a wedge between them.
While this premise shares the timeless sweep of the original Lion King, Jenkins anchors it in visual detail. There’s still no avoiding the weird cognitive disconnect of seeing photoreal big cats talking, but these animals are more expressive than Favreau’s.
Aided by wingman cinematographer James Laxton, Jenkins ensures you notice it by transposing his live-action facility for charged close-ups to IMAX-filling displays of whiskers, teeth and eyes. Elsewhere, close-ups of retractable claws and rippling fur under water show a feel for minutiae.
This sense of intimacy extends to some graceful touches, like the moment where Sarabi and Mufasa’s whiskers entwine lovingly. Fine voice work helps, with Pierre and Harrison Jr projecting conflict and chemistry through the CGI. Child voice actors Braelyn Rankins (Mufasa) and Theo Somolu (Taka) endear, especially singing the winningly propulsive I Always Wanted a Brother. And Mikkelsen delights with the coldly insinuating villainy of his song, Bye Bye.
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The sense of elemental scale on show is equally imposing. Jenkins uses 3D wisely to pull you into the vast landscape, where gushing waters and tumbling rocks impart elemental threats. As a young Mufasa duly notes, "Wow". There’s a light-footed fluency to Jenkins’s direction, too: when the camera adopts a cat’s-eye view as it tears across the landscape, you’re pulled along in unison.
Some distractions and developments stall that momentum, however. In the framing narrative, Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) lighten the mood but dilute the drama; the main story’s hornbill Zazu (Preston Nyman) is surely comic relief enough. And while Taka’s change into Scar is visually impeccable – narrowing eyes, sloping shoulders – the motivations seem too slight for such mortal frenemies as Scar and Mufasa.
Even if Scar is judiciously kept torn and complicated, it’s hard to shake a sense that romantic jealousy could have been less murderously resolved.
Still, Jenkins makes resonant work of other themes, from a subtext of tyranny vs unity to the ideas of home and heritage that underpin the mystical climax. Composer David Metzger provides respectable accompaniment, invoking Hans Zimmer’s classic score while adding his own strident cues.
Even if there’s no dislodging the original’s crown, Jenkins’s fable of broken bonds and binding legacies does it no dishonour.
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Mufasa will land in cinemas on Friday 20th December 2024.
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