My Review of "West Side Story (2021)"

West Side Story (2021) is a remake of the 1957 Broadway musical and 1961 movie of the same name. I personally haven't seen the musical or the older movie so I was going in green. I've been enamored by recent musicals lately like; In The Heights, and Tick, Tick... Boom!. These movies have really opened my eyes at what musicals can be so I thought this movie would be a shoe in to be great.

The story starts off with very stylish scenes. We're in a suburb of New York in the 1950s. There's been a big cultural change in the area. Puerto Ricans have been moving into the neighborhood. Old locals aren't happy with it and there is a race war brewing. Young hooligans that call themselves the Jets are trying to take power over the area. Meanwhile the local Puerto Rican gang called the Sharks try to thwart their attempts.

While this is going on we get introduced to a character named Tony. He's a troubled youth that just got out of jail to start a new life. He's affiliated with the Jets but has learned that violence is not the answer. Trying to turn a new leaf in this neighborhood will be more difficult than he anticipates.

The leader of the Sharks, Bernardo has a younger sister by the name of Maria. She's a little naïve to the situation in the neighborhood and new to everything in general.

One night there's a neighborhood dance that was organized to attempt to help amalgamate the groups and ease the tensions of the two warring factions. This is also the catalyst of the movie where Tony and Maria lock eyes with one another. The two immediately fall for each other despite their affiliations with each antagonistic groups.

It's sort of like a Romeo and Juliet situation and you get a lot of this throughout this movie. The whole plot is quite simple and easy to understand. That also makes this movie quite predictable. Then again if you think about it, this movie was based on a story from 1957. A lot of the things that we might think are cliché might not have been when this movie was first made.

The whole movie was color graded with sings and dance numbers very reminiscent to old 1950s movies. It is very stylish and you have to really commend them in how beautiful it looks. Though the generation now might not be able to relate to this movie as much. I even felt detached to this movie. It was almost like a culture shock for me.

That's not to say I didn't appreciate the spectacle. It's gorgeous and very artistic but it doesn't really speak to me for some reason. I don't think it's the source material because that was interesting. It may have been the execution. There doesn't seem like there's anything in this movie to make it feel modern. With that being said it made me question if they should have even made this movie when there's already a 1961 version. Why was this regurgitated in 2021?

In some ways you can see how this movie could have been the prequel to the movie In The Heights. There were so many possibilities to this movie. Instead it felt like I was watching an old movie.

The only thing I could think of that made this movie a little more modern was representation. I can see that they actually got Latino leads whereas in the old version they probably didn't do this. They also had a trans character that they probably didn't have in the original. I commend them for that.

One of the odd things I found about this movie was the way some of the songs were sung. All of the characters seemed to have New York or Puerto Rican accents except for our main leads Tony and Maria. It felt a little weird how this was done. Tony and Maria would sing reminiscent to 1950s movies with no real accent and very classical. When they weren't singing they would revert back to their accents.

Tony in particular would sometimes lose his accent throughout the movie. Maria was more consistent but there were weird things she would do in her songs. She would occasionally roll her "r"s while she was singing but then sometimes she would clearly annunciate every word. It was screwing with my head every time they were singing. This kind of threw me out of the movie at times.

Overall, this is still a very beautiful movie with a lot of great choreography and songs. I just felt that some of the execution to this movie was a little weird. They could have did a lot more with this movie but they opted to make it feel like it was back in the day. It made me question the reason why they made this movie in the first place. I have to give this movie a 6 out of 10. I just couldn't enjoy this movie as much as all the other musicals that have been released lately.