In the rebooted Mean Girls, calling someone a lesbian is no longer an insult, making yourself seem stupid to attract a boy is called out, and all the racism is thankfully absent. But this was a nerdy imitation of greatness, writes FLORA GILL

It’s a Wednesday and I’m about to watch the 2024 remake of Mean Girls. So of course I wear pink. If you don’t know why, then you’ve somehow, inexplicably, missed the funniest cult film of the early 1990s.

For my generation, Mean Girls was iconic. The 2004 original, which brilliantly cut through the cliques of an American high school, followed the efforts of new girl Cady Heron as she tried to fit in. I was 14 when it came out, and it felt to me and my friends like the first real movie about our age group.

We were too young when hits like Clueless and Pretty in Pink came out, and the characters in contemporary films like Legally Blonde were all in college – past the age where school gossip can make or break you. I wasn’t one of the cool girls at school and, like most people my age, had experienced firsthand the pain of peers talking about you behind your back.

So I rushed to see Mean Girls with a bunch of friends. I could pretend it resonated because of its lame commentary on societal expectations placed on teenage girls – but really it was just really funny. It struck such a chord that my best friend came to my 18th birthday party dressed as Cady. October 3 (the day Cady’s crush asks her what date it is, now known as “Mean Girls Day”) will forever stand out in my diary, and I still quote lines from the movie — a proud “You go, Glen Coco’ or a disappointed ‘Boo, you whore’ can apply to so many situations. I’ve been using both recently in response to friends telling me they’re doing Dry January.

But now that I’m 33—ironically a year older than Amy Poehler was when she played the “cool mom” in the original—I take my seat in the theater not knowing what to expect, or who this reboot is actually for.

Like Matilda and The Color Purple, Mean Girls went from a beloved movie to a successful musical… and then back to a movie of the musical. You might not realize this from the trailer. Viewers in America have even complained that they were tricked into watching the film without any idea that it contained singing.

Not that all musical adaptations are bad. I’m generally a big fan, but I’ve learned that they can make a beloved story much better (like Les Miserables) or much worse (I’ll never get the two hours I spent watching Lord of the Rings more back: The musical). So I wondered how close this song-filled remake would be to the original.

The answer? This is an almost scene-by-scene revival of the original, set only in the 2020s.

There’s no risk of spoilers, because either you’ve seen the original (and are therefore familiar with 60 percent of the new film’s script) or you haven’t seen it – in which case you’re better off skipping the remake and instead watch the 2004 version. .

Ironically, the problem is that both are working in the same creative hands. When Matilda The Musical was made, you had the idiosyncratic genius of comedian Tim Minchin at the helm to provide a new perspective on the 1996 Danny DeVito film adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic.

But this is a Tina Fey musical film, an adaptation of a Tina Fey stage musical, which itself was adapted from a Tina Fey film.

It’s as if she simply looked at her work on the original and decided, “This is all hilarious, let’s keep it all in.” Unfortunately, as the film progresses, for a superfan like me, this smacks of boredom-inducing laziness rather than a summary of comedic genius.

Almost every good moment is a copy of twenty years ago; there are almost no new pleasures for me to enjoy and embrace. Indeed, it feels less like a reboot than a nerdy imitation of greatness. It was like the kids from High School Musical were putting on a Mean Girls play.

The singing was good, I admit; Reneé Rapp, who plays Regina George, and Auli’i Cravalho (formerly known for playing Moana in the Disney film) who plays Janice, were the breakout stars, and I fully expect them to rise soon. But their singing is much better than the songs. I’m sure watching the show live in a theater is magical, but that doesn’t come across on screen, where the production values ​​felt no more impressive than a season finale of TV show Glee.

I was halfway done and ready to walk when Chef Mean Girl Regina George finally got hit by the bus.

You might think that none of this would bother today’s teenagers. Yet my 16-year-old sister Edith, like many in Generation Z, is obsessed with 90s and 2000s culture (she’s watched Friends more times than I have). So I guess this no restart won’t work with them either.

On the plus side, the producers have modernized the setting well. There’s a world where they could have turned the movie’s “Burn Book” (a bitchy scrapbook of photos and snide comments about the titular Mean Girls’ classmates) into a Twitter account and had them all vote on who would be the had the most ‘rizz’ (that’s ‘charisma’ for the over-40s) during the end-of-year dance. But it’s astutely just the “cool mom” desperately throwing around modern slang like “slay” and her own new hashtag.

Instead, the updates are subtle: the on-camera pieces from the original now work perfectly as TikToks, and there are even a few cameos from well-known influencers. Then of course there are other welcome corrections to mark the changing sensibilities: calling someone a lesbian is no longer an insult, making yourself look stupid to attract a boy is called out, and all the overt racism of the first film is thankfully absent.

Despite my criticism, I still enjoyed it. Half of my love for the original is in the memories of watching it with my friends, of having a shared lexicon. I never planned on watching the first movie in theaters with my little sister, but I’m taking her to see this version, warts and all. Anything that might drag us both away from our respective devices and get us to… to make a memory about boxes of popcorn is all in my book.