This element is, if you happen to’ll forgive me, just a little tiresome.
Yes, evidently Ursula and King Triton (Javier Bardem) are siblings and that he ascended to the throne as a substitute of Ursula in some type of unseen vying for the crown. Part of being the ruler of the seas is entry to a magical trident that permits its possessor entry to quite a lot of energy. Ursula feels she was cheated out of that energy, and has retired to a cave to sulk and to follow black magic. When she finds out that Triton’s daughter Ariel (Halle Bailey) has fallen in love with a human man, she sees it as a possibility. If she will put the little mermaid intentionally in danger, then she’ll have a bargaining chip with Triton. The actual plot of the movie has extra to do with Triton and Ursula, truly, than with Ariel.
One may be capable to see the film’s screenwriter, David Magee (“Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” “Finding Neverland”), straining so as to add to the fable. In that quest, he may need appeared to the 1989 characteristic, the place she had been Triton’s sister in earlier drafts of the movie’s script. The connection, nevertheless, was finally written out, although it survived within the novelization and within the play adaptation. Magee bringing this connection again in was additionally repeating a typical trope seen all through the current spate of Disney remakes, in that the villain characters are constructed to be as sympathetic as potential. Gaston from “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, was now a sufferer of PTSD.
While the motivation does undoubtedly enrich the character and makes her villainy extra comprehensible, it does, maybe sadly, rob Ursula of her central enchantment. We do not need to really feel sympathy for the ocean witch. She’s extra enjoyable to look at when she’s simply plain evil.