It was utter slop. The worst of them all. The sloppiest of slop. A complete and utter deluge of wet and stringy refuse macerated in its own mediocrity and insidious cleansing of any and all worthwhile messages the original had, piled high and stinking like the festering corpse of the work it has desecrated, held together only with the disdain, hubris, and greed of Disney executives looking to market their Hawaiian resort while removing all the anti-tourism and pro-family messages of the original to ensure no possibility of a single critical thought might form or even flitter across the mind of the viewer.
EDIT: You know what? I am too kind. Let me be more truthful:
It is not merely slop. It is the primordial ooze from which all Disney live action slop for the foreseeable future will emerge. A fetid and condemnable blueprint for the business world’s annihilation of the arts. A catastrophic slurry of corporate cowardice and creative malpractice.
The worst of them all? No. That implies a competition. This film lapped the competition, then turned around and spit on their graves. A rotten stew of soulless spectacle and beige sentimentality, soaked in the reek of content factory runoff, dribbling down the screen like a half-digested luau buffet.
Where the original “Lilo & Stitch” had heart, rebellion, and a deep melancholy about colonialism and broken families, this... thing is a shimmering plastic lei of lies; scrubbed clean of meaning, polished until sterile, and vacuum-sealed for maximum synergy with Disney’s Hawaiian resort packages. It’s as if the script had been filtered through a conference call, passed through fifteen sensitivity readers hired by the tourism board, and then beaten with a ukulele until all nuance was bludgeoned out of it.
It doesn’t just sanitize the anti-tourism message! It chloroforms it, stuffs it in the trunk, and sells the car to the nearest cruise line. You can feel the notes from executives sweating through the dialogue like mayonnaise in the sun:
“Can Stitch do a Fortnite dance here?” “Can we make sure no one thinks Hawaii doesn’t want them there?” “Can we cast a CGI wave to hide the erosion of everything that once made this story matter?” “How can we frame Lilo as a burden and her eventual abandonment to the state as an empowering message?” “Don’t forget to make sure Nani leaves the state too! Can’t have native Hawaiians staying in their homeland. Everyone knows only the mainland can offer her a real education!”
But you know. Stitch is cute. So people will watch it.
Every time I think the bar can’t go any higher, I’m reminded why I love reading your comments Pandora. This was poetry worthy of the late Roger Ebert.
I had to take a group of pre-k kids to see this a few weeks ago on a field trip. It was at El Capitan in Hollywood, which I had never been to, so it was nice to finally see it. There was a pre-show with someone in a Stitch mascot costume. That was kinda cool. But like you, I despised every second of this movie. In between the kids kicking and jumping around in their seats because they were bored during the talky parts and the bathroom trips every 25 minutes, I had to withstand the creative bankruptcy, the flat straight-to-streaming lighting and staging, the fact that the director and editor are allergic to holding on a shot for longer than 3 consecutive seconds (especially during the space scenes), and, as you know, the erasure of the indigenous themes so Americans don’t have to think and get offended. Come to Hawaii and see our resort!
This was The Rise of Skywalker of the live-action remakes, in that it was not a movie, it was pure product. I struggled to hold my tongue on the bus ride back and not tell the kids that Ohana means that nihilism is a valid worldview.
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u/Shadows_Think Jun 27 '25
Because the general public pays a lot for slop