12 Reasons that Amazon's Cinderella will leave your jaw on the floor

I considered doing a normal review of this film, but I realised that it wouldn’t fully convey my thoughts about this dreadful, dreadful movie. So I decided to compound the true what-the-hell aspects of the movie into a list and present them to you.

As an overall summation – I can understand what people (specifically 8-year-old girls, Twitter fanatics, the drunk and those too insecure about merely being heterosexual instead of any other letter) see in this film, as it is (at first glance) serviceable. But if you like me, and you like films that are actually good in detail, with good quality filmmaking, decisions and life within them, you are going to haaate this movie. For the twelve following reasons…

1. The terrible use of modern songs

Baz Luhrmann paradoxically doomed the musical industry when he made the incredible Moulin Rouge! in 2001, using modern pop songs and anachronisms in a musical setting instead of original music and lyrics. Since then, many projects, such as Mamma Mia, have tried to copy this approach, but unlike Luhrmann’s masterpiece, they can’t integrate the songs in a way that feels natural or clever. Cinderella is more proof of that in the worst possible way.

Much of the time, the songs used are spectacularly on the nose (Queen’s “Somebody to Love” when a main character is searching for love, or “Material Girl” when a character is discussing their materialism). But there are many more times when the songs used are so distractingly popular that they pull you out of the scene, and even more times, they’re deployed in ways so spectacularly stupid that I had no words to comprehend.

So, there’s one scene where a whole bunch of princesses start singing “Whatta Man” by Salt-N-Pepa, a song memed to death and very tonally inconsistent with the film (notably, they cut out the fingering lyrics). But FOLLOWING that, with a character not wanting to find love from these people…they start singing “Seven Nation Army”.

If Salt-N-Pepa and Jack White were dead, they’d be rolling in their graves.

2. CGI from a mid-2000’s video game

This one really shocked me. Not just because Amazon is one of the biggest film studios in the world and could afford any type of CGI they wanted. But because of how truly janky it looked.

When it came to rendering the mice in this story, gravity and skeletal structure were concepts not considered, as they seem to move on one axis and fall without a ruffle of fur. Compositing is 90’s level bad, while the general image quality of many of the visual effects is blurred to hide how rushed it is.

Then there’s the "magic" effects – they are literally just Adobe After Sparkle Effects on a bunch of white lines. Pouring glue and glitter on the film would produce the same effect.

Comparing it to an early 2000’s video game is accurate, but also kind of insulting. By 2004, Half-Life 2 had used motion-capture, real-time facial animations, detailed resolutions and all from completely original art assets. 17 years later, more people working with a job about 20 times easier screw up worse.

3. The lead actress (a singer) can’t even lip sync

I feel so bad for Camilla Cabello, who plays the eponymous servant girl in this revitalised tale. Everything about this screams corporate committee, and whatever effort she could bring to the table is thrown aside in favour of the blandest ideas imaginable.

Apparently, that committee also decided that natural singing was too out there, so they decided to make everyone lip sync to their vocals instead of recording on set (Even though many, like Camilla Cabello, Idina Menzel and even poor Pierce Brosnan are noted singers in their own right).

And you can tell. Holy crap, the opening song of this movie had me convinced that the stream was glitching out. Nobody’s lips matched any of the sounds being heard, and the ADR in this scene (and throughout the rest of the film) is rushed and utterly unacceptable.

Nobody learnt their lesson from Samurai Cop, it seems – get good on-set audio equipment.

4. Choreography (in theory)

So this movie comes from Kay Cannon, the director of Pitch Perfect, another movie largely coasting on its pop songs and a cast with sexy people in it to cover up its flaws. One thing you will notice going back and watching Pitch Perfect is that the choreography is over-edited, minimally kinetic and visually uninteresting. The music and singing is what attempts to carry Pitch Perfect.

This mentality carries through into Cinderella, where every single scene consists of people standing around, maybe turning 90 degrees or more, and whatever stunt that goes on awkwardly cut halfway through (like, they hired a hot stunt person who doesn’t sing or speak only to cut his cool trick in half – disgraceful). It feels so awkward and staccato, like a bad stage play from a director who doesn’t quite know what they’re doing. This is combined with some truly awful lighting and set design, which never frames the action in a way which is visually interesting.

In a good comparison to a similar film, I know a lot of people hate The Greatest Showman starring Hugh Jackman, but that movie absolutely nails scene choreography. With far less cutting, more elaborate dance moves and cinematography that makes excellent use of shadows, fire and lighting to create a real sense of a Victorian carnival show. It doesn’t feel like a stage play, but a real movie. Cinderella can’t access that feeling because it’s directed with minimal effort and with the hope that the music will be a crutch…

5. …which it isn’t.

Auto-tuning is a scourge of modern music and sound design. It’s where a computer will take the recording of a song and automatically set it to a certain pitch, meaning that lower pitches in an actor’s performance will be digitally switched to a different sound.

It’s why all pop songs seem to sound the same these days, and why older music, recorded on vinyl and CDs, sound so much better – they aren’t manipulated or sound unnatural for a human to sing. Cinderella’s sound technicians, on the other hand, went for the modern pop music direction…oh boy.

The digital processing scratches at the ears of everyone who listens to this film, which is an utter shame. Everyone has ripped into the sounds of auto-tuning in movies over the years, and after the auto-tuned mess that was Annie bombed, it was hoped that it would never happen again.

Dammit.

6. The least convincing sets you will ever see

I already mentioned the awful lighting, terrible visual effects and set design in the choreography segment, but there’s a lot more to discuss about Cinderella’s visual presentation. I legitimately think it may be one of the worst-looking major films released in some time.

The awfulness of this movie’s presentation mainly come due to its production and costume design. Everything looks like a stage prop – there’s little damage or weathering from time, nor any blemishes on people’s skin, nor creases in clothing. It looks so unbelievably clean and polished, resembling digital CGI rather than the real people on screen.

The framing of these sets is another huge problem – they’re often seen from one angle, usually flat or slightly tilted, and with little character infused within them. Treated as little more than backdrops, they feel so much like a façade, a cheap afterthought rather than something to really engross the viewer.

I’ve only seen trailers and bits of pieces of the 2015 Cinderella film, but that movie looks so much better than this film in every single way. Darker, creased clothing, twisted design, deeper and more lived-in sets. But then we get to the major problem…

7. Every scene is set at 2 in the afternoon

I mean it – every single scene in this movie seems to have been shot around midday in the least effortful conditions possible and without any consideration for lighting. This majorly contributes to the weird feeling of a fan film, but also ties in directly to the aforementioned problems with set design.

The lighting of this movie is so bright and so flat that much of the more intricate parts of sets and costumes, such as the textures of clothing or the scars on the walls or the beauty of the field around them, are completely blurred out. It renders each scene like a stock photo or a tourist shot, with no real life to it.

I’ll again refer to the 2015 Cinderella, which had a much darker colour scheme and shooting style to add to the fantasy tone of the whole affair, but I should also discuss another period drama movie I saw recently called Ammonite. Ammonite creates a sense of place so effectively through its use of shadows and candlelight – every blemish on a rock is seen, the emptiness of Mary’s life communicated with just the shadows alone.

Ammonite and the 2015 Cinderella were movies made with care for lighting in visual presentation. Amazon’s attempt isn’t, and feels even more cheap and rushed for it.

8. Surprisingly gross humour

Yeah – adult humour isn’t a problem inherently.

What is a problem is when a man creepily perves out on two minors and calls them “blossoming” in an attempt for a cheap creepy laugh.

Or maybe when James Corden gets turned into a human and starts talking about the wonders of his front tail?

Never again.

9. The hilarious ways the filmmakers try to make diversity quotas

One of the best things about re-watching Twilight is how if you look into all of the crowd shots, it’ll be a sea of white people with one Asian man because the filmmakers needed to fulfil minimum diversity quotas while filming in the area. Diversity isn’t the problem – it’s when a film is so obviously doing it out of active need instead of passively when it becomes hilarious.

There are a lot of black and brown people in Cinderella, some in major roles and others not. What becomes especially hilarious is when, in a scene where the all-white leads are having a discussion about something, a person of colour (or at one point, just a sign in Mandarin) will just be placed in the corner of the shot and stands absolutely stock still like a statue, or a stage prop, so the filmmakers can claim to have a minority in every second scene.

I can imagine the conversation;

“Hi, I need you to stand over there and do absolutely nothing.”

“May I ask why?”

“We need to fulfil our scene quotas, so we’re treating you as a distracting prop to get tickboxes from employers instead of giving you anything to do in this scene.”

“…I feel weirdly violated.”

“Good. Internalise it and process it during this shot. We may be a while.”

10. Changing the story’s original “problematic” elements (and somehow making it more problematic)

In James Corden’s pitch for this movie, one of his key goals was to remove the elements of the original story that he considered “problematic” – namely, the all-out misogynistic evilness of the mother character who prevents Cinderella from going to the ball, and the ending where she marries the prince without question and when he doesn’t recognise her face.

I’d personally argue that these aren’t actually issues that needed to be fixed, considering that the inherent moral of the story – the power of a good heart, spirit and hard-working – would remain intact regardless, and the story internally explains these with more magical causes. But what makes Amazon’s Cinderella so fascinating is that it actually adds in more problematic elements than it tries to remove!

I already mentioned the weird objectification that diverse actors are given, but the big one is the humanisation of the evil stepmother and the siblings. By giving them more sympathetic qualities and removing their black-and-white “evil”, the film has really given signs of forgiveness and love to a character who abused and psychologically tortured her daughter for over a decade.

Smooth, Corden. Smooth.

11. The most insulting pandering you will ever see

So I mentioned earlier that the audience for this movie was 8-year-old girls, Twitter fanatics, the drunk and those too insecure about merely being heterosexual instead of any other letter. The drunk are already catered for by the mere existence of visual stimuli, but the other 3 get so pandered to that you could file a condescension complaint under the Fair Work Commission.

8-year-old girls – the movie adds the character of the Royal princess, who actually spends the whole movie suggesting progressive ideas to her father (like wind power, tax reform and property building) and being constantly shouted down before being crowned Queen at the end of the movie by a regretful father. I think that if you wanted to give good messages about these topics, you don’t dictate them – that’s more likely to drive viewers away. But whatever, girl power.

Twitter fanatics – full of modern pop songs, stupid modern phrases and an ending that sees Cinderella abandon monarchy inn favour of economic independence and a refusal to rely on anyone else. Again, likely to have opposite effect.

Insecure heterosexuals – poor Billy Porter, a gay icon, gets flamboyantly shoved in the face of everyone watching this movie as the gay stereotype Fairy Godmother. With a stupid outfit, over-the-top performance and actually saying “Yaas, future Queen!” (I am not joking.), Porter and similar characters in the film are made simply for straight people who are insecure about their relationship with gay people and so simply respond and say these things in a tokenistic attempt to get gay people to like them. I think gay people are more likely to punch the screen than anything else, considering they have to wait even longer before a non-lesbian gets a role defined outside of political discourse or audience manipulation.

But then we get the most insulting and stupefying element of this movie…

12. A character wears plastic glasses in a film set in the 17th century.

On the left.

Yep.

So those are the twelve reasons. Maybe there are more, but if there are, you will need to see the film, which…don’t. A solid D-.

If you see this movie, tell me more reasons in the comments.