Octopus Overlords

My big complaints come with the way they introduced the characters in the first act. The cartoon establishes the characters very quickly and in a way where we know exactly who they are. Aladdin is a starving kid who needs to steal in order to survive (gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat), which makes the world see him as a street rat. When he gets away from the guards and is finally able to eat his bread (which again, he needs to live) he gives it to two other starving young children. We immediately see he's the diamond in the rough who can enter the Cave of Wonders. In the live action version he's stealing jewelry, not bread, and he's trading the stolen goods for food. When he meets the two young kids, he shares the food with them instead of giving them all of it. Small changes, but meaningful changes IMO. We also see that he's built mechanism's to keep his home hidden and protected. It doesn't make any sense for his character to be able to do this, and doesn't even come into play later on in the film. Plus, they show him parkouring all over Agrabah. He can't do some cool parkour moves to jump up to his home? Stupid.

Jasmine also has her introduction botched. In the cartoon she turns down a prince, saying she wants to marry for love and not be forced into it. We see she is protected and sheltered in the palace, so it makes sense when she runs away and runs into Aladdin. In this movie we meet Jasmine after she has already run away from the palace. We first see her giving someone else's bread to two kids. She's called a thief when Aladdin jumps in from nowhere to save the day. In the cartoon he sees Jasmine in the crowd and instantly has the hots for her. That's why he stepped in to save her. Here, he just kind of swoops in like Agrabah's Spiderman.

The cartoon Jafar finds out Aladdin is the diamond in the rough because he asks his version of the mirror mirror on the wall. That's admittedly clumsy and should have been updated. But here, Jafar and Iago realize that Aladdin is the diamond in the rough because he can break into the palace? That's lazy writing.

The cave of wonders was a big CGI fest. We could have had a fun action set piece here, but instead it was just all CGI with no real sense of anything. Probably the only action scene that didn't work for me in the film. And while we're on cave of wonders, they totally ignore the golden scarab that Jafar needs to piece together in order to find the cave. Not a huge deal, but it does imply that this cave is just out in the desert somewhere ready for anybody with a working GPS to find.

The movie started to pick up at this point though. Smith's version of Friend Like Me felt too much like he was trying to channel Robin Williams, but he started to put his own take on the role when they finally get out of the cave. Things really started to hit a high note during the Prince Ali song, and outside of a couple of hiccups I thought the rest of the movie was somewhere between good and great.