Mary Poppins Returns (2018)
Directed by Rob Marshall
Mary Poppins returns to the Banks family and helps them evade grave dangers by taking them on magical, musical adventures.
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What critics compared Mary Poppins Returns to
But the result is something more akin to Star Wars: The Force Awakens , the first of the saga from the House of Mouse, in that all the bells and whistles are there that made the original work, but they sort of just play the same song over again.
Disney is no stranger to this approach as Star Wars: The Force Awakens took a classic story and enhanced it for the modern era.
Or maybe it’s not, since Rob Marshall’s follow-up to the 1964 Julie Andrews classic plays like The Force Awakens to the original’s Star Wars – a structural replay of the characters and plot beats from its predecessor.
While Disney was able to make this same trick work when “The Force Awakens” retraced the footsteps of “A New Hope,” that film was about how stories reverberate throughout the ages; here, it just feels lazy.
In many ways, the film that is closest in tone to “Mary Poppins Returns” that I can think of is “The Force Awakens”—while both are ostensibly sequels, they also serve as de facto remakes of their respective originals in which most of the big moments and character beats of the earlier films are brought back into play.
Lin-Manuel Miranda has become a go-to songwriter for Disney — look at Mary Poppins Returns, for example — with an eclectic style that embraces many song genres, perfect for any Disney musical or the Broadway stage.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is pretty much a Disney legend thanks to his contributions to “Mary Poppins Returns,” “Moana,” and the upcoming “Little Mermaid” live-action remake (amongst many others), returns to write a handful of memorable, ear worm-y songs.
Just 23 years old, Hedges has already been Oscar-nominated for 2016’s “Manchester by the Sea” and has already earned a Golden Globe nomination for his excellent performance in “Boy Erased” (also highly recommended and in theatres now).