I've seen it twice now and have mixed feelings.
On the first watch, I really didn't like it. I just couldn't get over how awful the animals look. The mo-cap faces look bad - as most viewers and critics seem to have pointed out. But the animals are also horrifyingly inaccurate and unrealistic beyond just the technology - I'm talking sizes, coat colors, etc. Disney/Favreau's 2016 version took some pains at least to stock the cast with species at least native to India (if not always the Central Highlands), and gave some screen time to less depicted species like pangolins and pygmy hogs. Most look quite good, even if Baloo is still not a believable sloth bear (which I think is unfortunate).
This one does the exact opposite. Has anyone figured out what the antelope is that they prey on? It's definitely not a nilgai, blackbuck, chinkara, etc. Looks like a generic spiral-horned antelope with some inspiration from kudu, nyala and sitatunga. And then there's Tabaqui... a brown hyena, like, what!? Not a golden jackal as in the books, nor even a striped hyena... he's brown as bark, and woefully undersized, and with the single worst face in the movie. He looks more like Stitch or a gremlin. Akela, the head wolf, looks a lot more like a striped hyena, with his tuft and big, sloping back and bizarrely hyaenid face.
Then, there's the other wolves - some of which are weirdly piebald, and others of which are patterned like giraffes. It's all bizarre. I also didn't like that there was green algae-like grass growing on the elephant's back, but I guess that's from Kipling (as is Baloo's brown coloration). Kaa is like a giant version of Master Viper from KungFu Panda with pouting lips. Yes, pouting lips, lol.
Big exception: the monkeys. Andy Serkis can do primates and it showed. There's a lot of orc-like extra-ness to their body movements, but the faces and mannerisms are a great representation of the angry rhesus/bonnet macaques and grey langurs we get here in India.
Anyway, the visuals + some clunky dialogue moments ruined watch #1 for me, even though I did like some of the additions (much of the village/hunter sequence, and an albino wolf character) as well as the performance by Rohan Chand (Mowgli).
On Watch #2, I put aside my issues with the animals and actually really enjoyed the film. I think the best way to watch it is to see it as a highly fantastical and largely faithful adaptation of the book, which was always full of biological oddities. Down to the "British Raj" gymkhana vibes you get from the wolves interacting with each other. Cumberbatch's lame Shere Khan grew on me, as did the new dynamic between Baloo and Bagheera. I feel like a better name for this movie would have been "Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book", because it's best enjoyed in context of the OG book.
I'm also a huge fan of how he's worked in the theme of otherness. It's almost an elevation of that aspect from the book. Many critics seem to dislike the village sequence, but it was my favorite part of the movie. The climax felt a little rushed but, imo, had the right idea. Act 1 was also good at bringing out the intra-wolf politics, Shere Khan-induced manipulations and tensions around the conservatism of the Laws of the Jungle - all intriguing bits of the book that get lost in adaptations that are forced to be more child-friendly. I thought the conservation / human-wildlife conflict angle ended on a very awkward note ("with the hunter and tiger gone, peace prevailed again" felt like a strange message after Akela noted that human encroachment had been taking its toll on the jungle long before the hunter's arrival, unless they're making the somewhat weird insinuation that man was "taking more of the jungle" solely as reprisal for Shere Khan's cattle killing.) But Serkis has always stressed the "otherness" theme as more important... and that he has achieved 100%.
I'll watch it a third time, I'm sure - but I loved Watch #2, which makes me all the angrier that the team seems to have put zero effort into animal research.
EDIT, PS: Is it being marketed heavily in other countries? Netflix has balled out to make as big a splash with this movie as possible here in India. They've made it available not just in Hindi but two regional languages, and got an absolute A-list of Bollywood actors to voice the characters. Billboards everywhere... in Mumbai, where I live, there is a stretch of prime advertising space along our most heavily trafficked and iconic road with SIX different Mowgli billboards one after the other. Inescapable.
