The movie is, in its way, excellently conceived and executed. My question is, who is the target audience?

Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book has been made and remade several times over the years, most famously (three times, in fact) by Disney. All three Disney versions, while certainly entertaining for adults at some level, have been targeted primarily at a young audience (although some aspects of the 1967 animated version haven't aged particularly well).

But Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, relegated to Netflix by the success of Disney's excellent 2016 live-action Jungle Book remake, doesn't seem to have a good sense of its own identity. It's still at its heart a child's tale -- a young boy raised in the jungle by talking animals -- but it's far too dark and violent to show to a child. In fact, after earning a PG-13 rating in the U.S., I have to wonder if Serkis believed teenagers were eagerly looking for a Mowgli tale to call their own.

Audience aside, this version of the tale has many unanswered questions. Foremost among them, for me, is why a bear and a panther live as respected members of a jungle wolf pack. In other versions of the story I've seen, the popular Baloo and Bagheera characters interact with, but are not members of, the pack that adopts the orphaned Mowgli. Here, they are part of the pack hierarchy and seem never to relate to members of their own kind.

Also, how did Mowgli survive the tiger's attack in the bloody first scene? The infant, found drenched in his mother's gore by Bagheera, was well within the tiger's reach but ... just lived?

All that said, Mowgli has its strengths. The motion-capture techniques employed here by Serkis -- who also starred as the bear Baloo, here reimagined more as a grizzled army drill instructor than the lovable goof we all know and love -- give the jungle animals a very lifelike facial structure that is, in many ways, almost human. The effect is quite different from Disney's 2016 film, which is so realistic looking the animals could almost be seen as real, if not for them talking.

The movie stars the voice and motion-capture talents of, among others, Christian Bale as Bagheera, Benedict Cumberbatch as Shere Khan, Cate Blanchett as Kaa (here reinvented as a kind of mystical jungle avatar), and Naomie Harris, Peter Mullan and Louis Ashbourne Serkis as the wolves Nisha, Akela and Bhoot. There aren't a lot of people in the movie, obviously, but young Rohan Chand does a wonderful job as the feral child Mowgli, while Matthew Rhys adds a couple of unexpected twists as the trophy hunter Lockwood.

I'm actually quite glad I watched this version of the story, because it is well crafted and deserves to be seen. However, I don't expect I'll watch it again, while I am looking forward someday soon to sharing Disney's 2016 masterpiece with my still-too-young kids.