Sarah Wandor
Movie Critic Columnist
“Cinderella” (2021) is an Amazon original about the well-known fairy tale with a modern musical twist to it. It follows Ella, or “Cinderella,” who dreams of opening her own shop to sell her signature dresses and the rest of the fairy tale flows from there.
The idea itself is interesting but is poorly executed. Although it is a musical, the song choices and flow of them are extremely lacking. They come in at unnatural times with lyrics that sound like they were slapped together because they needed a song for that moment in the film.
The characters sing just because “musical” is in the description of the movie, instead of allowing the songs to have purpose and meaning. Granted, not all of the songs are like this, but sadly most of them are.
However, not only are some of the song lyrics lacking, but the conversations between characters are childish and awkward, to say the least. It’s like listening to 5-year-olds talk, yet it’s not charming or cute. It’s simply awkward and hard to watch, and it’s hard to fathom an adult saying those words.
The dialogue is consistently thrown together and any progressive purpose they were supposed to carry is left to the side. It was as if nothing was thought through before the film was released.
The entirety of it was closer to a draft than anything else. It was clear that much work still needed to be done, as was evident mostly through the writing. Yet, for some unknown reason, the film was released when so much still needed to be done with it.
Unfortunately, it was not given the time it deserved which resulted in the catastrophe that is shown on screen.
The amount of work and editing that was left undone dragged the film down and caused it to lose what little magic it had. It was too rushed and it showed by the pace of the film, the characters and so on.
The film also attempted to tackle serious topics, trying to be inspiring in overcoming them. Yet it failed in each of these categories as well. It didn’t resolve the issue that it spent building up nor did it give the characters the development they needed to overcome them. They just suddenly did it without anything prior to it.
The one thing the film did well was its costumes and the great variety of colors it used. It showed people’s character, helped it appear livelier and gave it some detail. But costumes are not enough to save a film.
What “Cinderella” resulted in was a film with a creative twist to an old story, yet not nearly enough time was spent thinking through the execution of the production. It was sloppy with writing pulled from thin air, with little to no thought as to how it sounded.
Heavy themes were ignored for most of the film then just magically disappeared at the end. It was a film that needed more attention than it received and become a disaster before the movie even began.