So my mind keeps circling this year’s release of Disney’s Live-Action version of Aladdin.It feels to me that the movie just didn’t quite work and as a writer I want to dissect the corpse and find out why. I may not have found the primary cause but I think at the very least I diagnosed a serious complication and contributing factor.

In the 1992 release the character of Jasmine, Aladdin’s love interest, is principally a human McGuffin. The set-up of the story is that Jasmine, by law, must marry before she turns sixteen, as the only offspring of the ruling Sultan, Jasmine becomes the route to power. Her husband will rule and Jafar, the scheming adviser/sorcerer, wants to marry her for that power while Aladdin, the good hearted ‘diamond in the rough’ wants to marry her for love and thus will wield that power more justly. Jasmine simply wants to choose for herself and not be ordered to marry someone she doesn’t love. Jafar and Aladdin have opposed goals, only one can achieve their desired end and as such the plot has conflict between its two poles of good and evil. Jasmine has no song in the 1992 version because there is very little she is trying to achieve and very little character beneath her surface motivations.

The 2019 release of the story has made critical changes to the plot. Jasmine is no longer forced to marry on any timeline, removing the ticking clock that helped drive the earlier version. Jafar, with somewhat deeper motivations, has plots to seize power without the requirements of a royal marriage, which removes the conflicting goal between him and Aladdin. The two characters are no long directly opposed ceasing to be well-defined protagonist and antagonist.

Complicating matter from a structural standpoint Jasmine has now been given her own goals and motivations and a song. She is presented as smart, capable, and with a burning desire to serve her people as a leader, but thwarted in this because of her sex. She wants the throne not for vain glory or to make the Kingdom a great power but because she wants what is best for the populace, placing her in direct conflict with Jafar. It terms of the plot Jasmine and Jafar are now our respective protagonist and antagonist.

This would be perfectly fine if  the script had been re-written with the dynamic had formed the spine of the story but the movie insists that Aladdin is the hero, he is the protagonist in a story in which his stakes are secondary when compared to other characters.

Look at the stakes for each character.

Jafar, failure means loss of position, imprisonment, or death because if you move against the Sultan and fail it will end badly.

Jasmine, failure means the people loss her leadership, her empathy, and she is consigned to a lifetime of watching an evil man ground the populace in the war plans.

Aladdin, failure means he continues his life of poverty. Aladdin’s stakes are improvement of his life or stasis; he stays where he is. No ticking clock, no disaster befalls him, not the sort of things the Jasmine and Jafar are facing.

To fix this they needed to either give Aladdin stakes that mattered as much as Jasmine’s or Jafar’s or they need to re-conceive the story with Jasmine as the lead, the protagonist, the hero.