Dismayingly, Spielberg didn’t have the courage or the insight to imagine it.

Spielberg didn’t open up the story to involve new ideas and experiences, nor did he reckon with the cultural and political forces that gave rise to “West Side Story” in the first place.

He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes.

Spielberg, by contrast, delivers the very kinds of diagnoses that the song is meant to mock—he himself Krupkifies the film.

The change is emblematic of Spielberg’s failure, because it isn’t only visual imagination and fantasy that he can’t match.

In Wise’s version, the very walls of the gym are hot with passion, painted a furious red, and the dancing itself, unlike that in Spielberg’s film, is blatantly erotic

if Spielberg were interested in Tony’s life rather than his checklist of motives,

Yet Spielberg directs her to act like a Disney princess, with oversimplified facial and vocal expressions reflecting a single unambiguous emotion at a time.

with a voice both powerful and delicate.

whose mother is Colombian.

Natalie Wood, of course, had no business playing Maria in the original film, and her irrepressible presence couldn’t salvage the dismally narrow role.

but even here Spielberg relies on her presence to justify his superficial and reductive choices.

In the original film,

Indeed, Spielberg’s film radically, woefully transforms the one scene in the original that conveys a sense of Maria and Tony’s family histories,

In the new film, she has been in the city for years, caring for her father (it’s hinted that he died), and she expresses, in a single line, a desire to go to college. Bernardo is now a boxer just beginning his career. Chino, an undefined presence in the original, is now in night school, studying accounting and adding-machine repair. But nothing comes of these new practical emphases; the characters have no richer inner lives, cultural substance, or range of experience than they do in the first film. Maria still has little definition beyond her relationship with Tony; she remains as much of a cipher as she was in the 1961 film.

Maria has a fuller life in New York than she did in the 1961 film. In the original,

Whatever Spielberg and Kushner may have had in mind, what they deliver with this simplistic backstory is an endorsement of incarceration: the movie makes clear that Tony came out of prison a better person than he went in.

By contrast, the Tony of Spielberg’s film is a convict who has spent a year in Sing Sing because of a fight in which he nearly killed another young man. He avoids the Jets because he doesn’t want to jeopardize his parole. When Riff tries to persuade him to take part in the “rumble” with the Sharks anyway, Tony explains that he’d spent his time in prison examining himself ruefully and resolving to live differently.

The original Tony,

For all of its faults, the original film doesn’t rationalize aggression—or racism—away or reduce its characters to single motives.

In the original,

Whereas once the area was sufficient for both sides, there’s now only room for one. (There’s no hint of the fact that San Juan Hill was, in fact, a predominantly Black neighborhood.) The filmmakers’ attempt to pin down a cause for the Jets-Sharks rivalry reflects their more general shift, in the new film, toward facile psychologizing.

They’ve made ill-conceived additions and misguided revisions. In the process, they’ve managed to subtract doubly from the original.

But, instead of reconceiving the story, they’ve shored it up with flimsy new struts of sociology and psychology, along with slight dramatic rearrangements.

This is not the plot of the latest horror film from A24 but the unfortunate tale of Steven Spielberg’s efforts to remake “West Side Story,” the movie musical about love and ethnic rivalry among New York City gangs.

rich and famous artist spends a hundred million dollars to revive a corpse with the blood of young people