Mary Poppins vs. Mary Poppins Returns: Supporting Characters
Tuesday, January 15, 2019 at 8:00PM by Lynn Lee
Among the sharper observations I’ve seen regarding Mary Poppins Returns is that it is to Mary Poppins what The Force Awakens was to Star Wars: A New Hope. In each case, the sequel feeds shamelessly off fans’ nostalgia by recreating every beat of the original film – the plot arc, the character dynamics, even the distinctive look of the original, tweaked to reflect the changing mores of the past several decades. In short, it’s the same movie, just repackaged.
Setting aside whether it needed to be made at all, does Mary Poppins 2.0 improve at all on the original formula? In The Force Awakens, the one real added value was the new characters. In many ways they felt like rebooted archetypes from A New Hope, yet for the most part they also felt fresh and intriguing. Is the same true for Mary Poppins Returns? Let's do a side-by-side comparison...