Many teenage girls have at some point seen the movie Mean Girls. For those who haven’t seen the original, the early 2000s comedy takes place in what is portrayed to be an average American high school, in which the school lives under the reign of the three popular “plastics.” When a new girl “Cady” moves to the school from Africa, she is adopted as the new addition to the plastics. Cady deals with juggling the life of her popular friends and her less popular artistic friends. 

The coming-of-age movie has stood the test of time, remaining a classic through the 21st century. This year Tina Fey decided to rewrite her original make of Mean Girls, and the movie was remade in musical format and released to theaters on January 8. Remaking a movie to live up to the standard of its original success is difficult, so how did Tina Fey do?

Mean Girls was my favorite movie in middle school, so I know much of the script by heart. The first thing I noticed while watching the movie was how closely the script of the remake followed the original. The sequence of the scenes was similar, the events within the scene and even the words said by the characters were almost identical to the original movie.

 However, following the script so closely made it a difficult task for the actors, since they had to focus on making sure they didn’t sound like they were reciting their lines from their memory of the old movie. I felt the actors failed at effectively overcoming this task. Many of the lines delivered felt forced as if they were racking their brain to remember what the line was in the old movie.

Another thing that disappointed me about the movie was when I learned it was a musical. I personally don’t like musicals because I find that the plot is much harder to follow. Why remake a classic movie as a musical? Unfortunately, I felt that the musical part of this movie made it cringier than it needed to be.

While there were aspects I disliked about this movie, I did like the way they incorporated the actors from the old movie. Lindsay Lohan made a guest appearance, and the actor of the former homeroom teacher was the same. Overall, I do think this is a movie worth watching if you are a Mean Girls original fan. However, if you don’t understand and appreciate the plot of the original movie, I do not think this movie is for you.