Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle Review

It's not often that I review Netflix original films on this blog. Most of the time when I check them out, I'll either post something quick on Facebook or simply leave it to my own personal enjoyment. However, occasionally an exception comes around and that's most definitely the case here with Andy Serkis' "Mowgli," partially due to the fact that I've put so much personal investment into following this film for several years now and partially due to the fact that it wasn't initially supposed to be a Netflix original film. I'll get to all of that history in this review because I think the story behind the making of this film and its journey to arriving directly to all your devices is a rather fascinating one. In fact, I would say at least having a basic knowledge of all of that is going to help your viewing experience. One might think that this is a movie that was quickly thrown together to cash in on the success of Disney's own live action remake of "The Jungle Book" back in 2016, yet dumped onto Netflix once Warner Bros. realized that they weren't going to make much of a profit on it. If anyone thinks that, I don't blame them at all for coming to those conclusions. In fact, I expected that sort of reaction. However, that couldn't be further from the truth, which is why I'm here to explain.

This is a movie that has gone through several different title changes, but I liked the fact that they settled on "Mowgli" because that seems like a very fitting title for what this movie is trying to accomplish. Yes, in every iteration of "The Jungle Book," which initially began in 1894 as a collection of stories by author Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli is the central character. But in most of these versions the focus seems to be more on all of Mowgli's adventures in the jungle, which is especially the case with Disney's 1967 animated movie. While that movie is adorable, charming and super infectious with all of its music, it barely has much of a story to it. It's more of a collection of fun sequences loosely threaded together with a basic storyline, which was a common narrative structure for early Disney. Meanwhile, Andy Serkis' "Mowgli" has less of a jungle focus to it as it's more of a coming of age story for Mowgli himself, with everything in the jungle being there to support his journey in figuring out who he is. Because, yeah, he's a human who grew up with animals, so he naturally doesn't fit in with the animals super well, but when he goes back to the village, he's not cultured enough to figure out how to properly interact with the humans because he's had zero experience in that area.

Surprisingly I found myself quite invested in this story and it has enough unique twists to it that I genuinely didn't know what direction the movie was going. We start out with Mowgli with the pack of wolves, like in every other Jungle Book movie, but this iteration of the story takes a more grounded, realistic approach. The older Mowgli gets, the more he realizes that he's not a wolf. There comes a point in the pack where all the cubs need to pass a certain test in order to be able to be able to hunt with the pack and Mowgli sure as heck ain't gonna pass this test. Why? Because he's a human. He wasn't built like a wolf. He can't run as fast as the wolves, nor does he have the skills to be evasive enough to make up for it. He's not a wolf and nothing he can do can change that. Baloo does his best to try to train him to use his other skills so that he can pass the test, but it's a huge uphill battle. This leads to Bagheera playing the voice of reason, demanding that he needs to go to the man village because that's where he belongs, especially because Shere Khan is out there in the jungle with a vendetta against Mowgli. The longer Mowgli stays in the jungle, the higher the probability that Shere Khan, or one of the other dangerous animals in the jungle, catches him.

This is where the story veers a bit from your typical Jungle Book movie because it's usually towards the end of the movie where they get to the man village and you usually don't see a lot of the other humans in the story. But Mowgli ends up back in the man village probably towards the middle of the film. And initially things seem to be going fine and peachy as there's several adults that take him under their wing, but then there's the idea here that the humans don't have very much respect towards animals and that doesn't sit well with Mowgli. I'll leave it off right there because I don't want to spoil what happens in the film, but these were some interesting arcs that I found myself attached to while watching the movie. In terms of that, I enjoyed the fact that I was watching a remake of a movie we've all seen done a thousand times before, yet I had no idea what direction they were going. If we're going to do all of these remakes, that's a direction that's more intriguing to me. And this is a conversation that's going to come up a lot in this next year with Disney having "Dumbo," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King" all on the docket in 2019. What are they going to do to separate these new versions from the old classics that we all know and love?

I wish Disney would take some notes from these other versions of these movies, but they're most certainly not going to because Disney is making a ton of money by creating carbon copies of their popular classics, with "Beauty and the Beast" being a prime example of that. Now I actually enjoyed that live action "Beauty and the Beast," but my biggest complaint then, that certainly is the case now, is that if I'm going to revisit "Beauty and the Beast" in the future, which version am I going to gravitate to? The answer there is the animated version. That's why I really appreciated the story of "Mowgli" because it does something different. This is a darker, grittier, more grounded version of the story that doubles as the evil step-brother of Disney's own live action remake from a couple years back, which is why I think both can live in harmony with each other. Now if we hone in specifically on Disney's remake of "The Jungle Book," that's a scenario where Disney took their previous material and crafted it into a better film, which is why it's their best live-action remake yet. But it's still a Jungle Book film that you know what's going to happen. "Mowgli" uses the Jungle Book lore as a backdrop to tell its own story, which is why I really appreciated it as a remake.

On that note with the Disney remake, that segways perfectly into the history of this film. Is this a scenario where Andy Serkis looked at the success of Disney's film, which nearly made $1 billion worldwide, and decided to use that as a motivation to make his own Jungle Book film? No. Absolutely not. In fact, production for this film started back in 2012 with Warner Bros. deciding that they wanted to do this film, with Steve Kloves, Alejandro Inarritu and Ron Howard as early directors attached to the project before Andy Serkis was officially brought on in 2014. Disney didn't start production of their movie until 2013, so the real story is that there was a race to see which studio would get their film out first. A race that Disney would go onto win because their production went a bit smoother. Andy Serkis spent a long time crafting this film because he wanted to make sure all of the visual effects were right. Instead of doing the whole thing on a computer, which is what Disney did with their version, Serkis was more focused on doing this one via performance capture. Given that he is the king of performance capture with the likes of Gollum and Caesar, it seemed right to make sure he got everything correct rather than rushing things for the sake of money.

There's a bit of a double-edged sword with that, though. Personally I had been following this race since it began. Knowing Andy Serkis, I was willing to be patient with him and accept both versions of the film. But I knew that this was going to kill the movie's popularity. With Andy Serkis being so late in getting his film finished, I knew everyone else was going to be confused as to why we were getting another Jungle Book movie. And my fears were realized once they finally started advertising this film. No one seemed interested. And I was sad. That's also part of the reason why this ended up on Netflix instead of getting a theatrical release because Warner Bros. knew that this was going to be a disaster at the box office, so they sold the rights to Netflix for distribution. Again, people are going to look at this negatively because "Netflix original" seems to be the new "straight to DVD" in people's minds. And while there's basis to that thought with a lot of bad Netflix films out there, I don't think it's completely fair because Netflix and Amazon are working on changing the game when it comes to streaming as both platforms have been scowering the indie market, searching for films that deserve an audience, yet probably wouldn't get one with a traditional theatrical release.

That's the sad state of society right now. You see a lot of people demanding for their to be more original films, but when said original films get released, no one gives them the time of day. Believe it or not, there's actually a lot of original films out there. If you don't believe me, then go look at the list of films that debuted at film festivals such as Sundance, Cannes, TIFF, New York and many others. They're out there. It's just that many of them don't get picked up by studios and go unwatched. Others that do get picked up fail when they get put in theaters. If more people would decide to go watch these films, Hollywood would pay attention and more of them would get a bigger push. But given that the film industry is a business, studios have to put out what audiences will pay for and right now it's all of the sequels, remakes and franchise films that are what audiences are willing to pay for. This upcoming weekend, everyone is going to be seeing "Aquaman," "Mary Poppins Returns" and "Bumblebee," but how many people comparatively are searching for "The Favourite," "If Beale Street Could Talk" or "Green Book" to see over the holidays? Yes, I'm excited for those blockbuster films, too. But I wish more people would give a chance to the smaller films.

That's why I'm glad at the work that Netflix and Amazon are doing, or at least trying to do. That's why I don't see "Mowgli" as a Netflix dump. In fact, I see it as a situation where Netflix knew that it was going to be a failure in theaters since audiences just weren't reacting to the marketing and collectively Netflix, Warner Bros., Serkis, and co. decided that a Netflix release would be the best platform to actually give this movie an audience. Has it worked? Well, I don't know. Netflix doesn't exactly release their viewing numbers, so I can't just look up the stats like I do for weekend box office totals. I just know that this movie was going to be a flop in theaters, so I hope that it's getting good viewing numbers on Netflix. Netflix wants more big-budget films like this on their platform and I hope that this can be a stepping stone for that because it's hard for every movie to do well at the box office because there's only so many theaters around to show all the films. Yet there's unlimited space on streaming services so more movies can co-exist on Netflix as compared to the theaters. Now I do wish I could've seen this movie on the big screen because I feel it was made for that. But that just wasn't destined to happen due to everything that I've stated in this review.

My final word on this movie is that I hope you give it a shot. If you already have a Netflix account, you can close this review and go watch it right now without spending any extra money than you otherwise would've. Just your normal monthly Netflix fee. If you don't have Netflix, then I'm sure you can find someone that does if you want to watch this movie because it's worth it. Yes it's true, I have more emotional investment in this film than your average person because of how closely I've been following this. If I take a step back, I have to admit that Andy Serkis is not as experienced at writing and directing a film as he is with his performance capture. So the movie is a bit rough around the edges in terms of some of the writing and directing. Disney had a smoother film with their 2016 movie that ultimately makes it better. But Andy Serkis' performance capture work is rather fascinating and I liked how we had real sets instead of the movie being a glorified animated film. Does it always work? Well, I don't know. Some of it seemed a bit rough and unfinished, but I don't know if that was the movie itself or the picture quality on my tablet. As a whole, though, I still think this is a solid effort that I enjoyed watching, so I'm going to give "Mowgli" an 8/10.