A good movie

When I first heard that Steven Spielberg was coming up with a remake of this legendary classic musical, I can’t say I was really excited by this idea. However, even though it was a box-office flop, it turned out to be a huge critical success and, since it was available on Disney+, I thought I might as well check it out after all. Well, even though the original ‘West Side Story’ is one of the very few musicals that I really enjoyed, to be honest, I really struggled to care about this remake though. Sure, there was no doubt that it was technically fine, the whole thing was visually very well done and Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler had a solid chemistry. However, it still felt rather pointless to come up with another really faithful adaptation of the famous stage musical. Indeed, the 1961 version was already quite faithful but above all it was already pretty much downright amazing. Of course, they tweaked some elements, the most obvious and welcome update was to have a completely Latino cast to play the Sharks and other Puerto Rican characters. However, even in this case, they could have gone further by casting some actual teenagers as, except for Rachel Zegler, all the actors were still much older than their respective characters. Anyway, even though the critics were super enthusiast, as far as I was concerned, this new version felt rather redundant and the fact that this movie (and the older version) are really long probably didn’t help. I can understand the appeal for Spielberg to finally direct a musical, one of the very few genres he never tackled yet in his career but imagine if, in 2060, some heralded director would decide to remake the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy just because he loved it so much back then when he was a kid? Anyway, to conclude, even if I wasn’t really sold by the damned thing, it was still a very well made old-fashioned musical and it is worth a look, even if the whole thing felt rather pointless, at least, to me.