I don’t understand why this movie exists. Like, okay, yes, every generation wants to make its own Jane Austen interpretations, and I get that. I’m not going to say that Emma (1996) is the one canonical movie adaptation that precludes any other from existing.

But: If you’re going to make a new adaptation when an old one was successful, you need to be clear about what it is you’re doing differently. You need to have a different take, a different angle, a different point of view, a different aesthetic. This one has… I don’t know, the interiors are brighter, the landscapes more open, but other than that, it just seems to be doing the same thing, only a little less well.

Like, Frank Churchill is supposed to be a charming rake, right. And Ewan McGregor does that really well in the 1996 version: You can tell he’s up to no good from minute one, but you still kinda want to like the guy. In this version, they have this weird-looking giant-eared motherfucker who has all the affect of a serial killer. Anya Taylor-Joy is a perfectly adequate Emma, but if you want enthusiastic, self-important obliviousness, you just can’t do better than Gwyneth Paltrow. Even smaller characters are better in the other version — the Miss Bates in this one is just kind of a graceless clod, not the twitteringly awkward chatterbox of the 1996 version, which makes the picnic scene play out way less naturally.

If there’s one thing to be said in this version’s favour, it’s that its Mr. Knightley seems more age-appropriate to Emma (though I think in terms of the actual actors’ ages, that’s not true), but idk, while I thought the book was way gross in this regard, I thought the 1996 movie’s dynamic worked.

There’s nothing really wrong with this movie; it’s fine, it works. But it’s almost purely worse than the 1996 version, and doesn’t ever convince me that there was a reason to make it beyond “hmm, we haven’t revisited this IP for a few decades, probably clear for another go at it.”