Cinderella 2021: Smell the Auto-Tune, Taste the Auto-Tune

Cinderella 2021

So, this movie is a thing. I don’t really see why it was made, but I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. It was actually enjoyable to watch at some parts, and the jokes that weren’t cringey were actually kinda funny. The plot isn’t all that bad, although it felt stretched out at times. The plot was a touch generic, but was different enough from the original to be a whole new movie. As far as remakes go this movie wasn’t too bad. I’ll try to highlight some of the good things.

Okay. with that out of the way, time to rant on how so incredibly cringey this movie is. 

1. Almost all of the jokes are either really badly timed, not funny at all, or just painfully cringey. For example, the joke about misgendering rats. I get that misgendering is a problem and they want to portray how annoying that is, but the way to do that is not a joke about rodent stereotypes. Also what kind of logic is that rats are boys and mice are girls? 

       2. The stepsisters. Every scene with them is just painful to watch. Not a single thing they say is funny in any way. 

       3. A lot of random things are added that seem to exist just to extend the runtime. For example the random musical parts. All the musical parts are very very random. Musicals should have some context for singing, not “Hey I just woke up I should sing.” All of the singing is also too long.

       4. You can smell the auto-tune. In fact, you can taste it in the air. I don’t like any of the songs including Seven Nation Army and Perfect but that’s a personal opinion.

There are also some more serious problems with the movie like the plot and the acting.

Another plot problem was how they took away the original destitution of Cinderella’s situation and turned it into a kinda bad stepmother. She seems to have a pretty good relationship with both of her sisters, encouraging one of them to find love in herself and not care what others think, while joking with both of them. The only bad thing about Cinderella’s situation is that she has a stepmother who is kinda mean to her. But even then, there isn’t much outward incentive that we are introduced to as to why Cinderella should make her own business other than she wants to, which is a good reason but not for storytelling purposes. 

There were a lot of times in the movie where the characters did things for no apparent reason other than to further the plot. For example, early in the movie after the prince’s first musical number, Cinderella decides to climb on the statue of the king and sit on it. Why? Don’t ask me. Because the movie never actually explains to us why she does this, other than to get the attention.

Another problem was the way they tried to portray the time period. The way people talked and did things felt out of place, just the acting felt like it was not actually happening in the right time period. An example of this would be the way they ride horses. The “prince” threw the horse back too much when he was riding.

This movie was so bad, but it had one or two good things too. On our rating system, the raisin-meter, this movie gets 23/100 raisins. 

Review by David, Zoe, and Emma.