The 2024 musical remake of “Mean Girls”4 uses the setting of the modern American highschool to toy with the same ideas as America’s Founding Fathers.

As far as the plot goes, if you liked “Mean Girls” (2004), then “Mean Girls” (2024) is for you. It’s basically the same movie but as a musical, with a different cast, adapted to fit slightly more modern times, and it’s not as good as the original. 

The film begins with the good-natured and clearly homeschooled Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) moving from Kenya to the Chicago suburbs. 

This movement from the African wild to civilized America already suggests the entrance into a higher society where laws and customs based on rationality reign. 

Quite the opposite happens, however, as Heron finds the rules of the jungle — survival of the fittest — are in place. Amidst this primal society, Regina George (Reneé Rapp), whose very name suggests her queenship, reigns over the school like a despot. 

One of the songs, “Apex Predator,” even shows scenes of students acting like animals. George, the Apex Predator, controls everyone by flawlessly exercising the power of her feminine beauty. 

This power Regina, or Queen George, holds, like the power King George III had, is something everyone wants a part of. Since it’s a vulgar society where the strongest and most passionate rule, the whole school falls victim to George’s treachery.

But George makes a vital mistake by betraying Heron after bringing her into her exclusive fold — called The Plastics for being glamorous but also “shiny, fake, and hard.” After this betrayal, Heron and her outcast friends decide to overthrow George through a musical number titled “Revenge Party.”

Driven by a desire for revenge, Heron succeeds in taking down George, but in the power vacuum, she is sucked into her own position. Infected with power, Heron becomes a plastic despot nearly as ruthless as George. 

When George finds out the plan for her downfall was concocted by the new queen, Heron, she plants a book with insults for every member of her class, excluding Heron and the rest of The Plastics, thus framing them as the book’s creators.

The whole class breaks into one massive fight over the book as passions rage. As a result, the women of the school are called into an assembly. One of the teachers, played by Tina Fey, brings the women together by having them recognize they are not just victims but perpetrators too. 

People bring forward testimony of times they’ve wronged people. Heron’s outcast friend, Janis Sarkisian (Auliʻi Cravalho) then reveals they plotted to take down George to the assembly and sings a song in praise of herself and her individualism. 

George runs out after Sarkisian’s revelation while Heron follows asking for forgiveness. George is then suddenly hit by a school bus. 

After this event, Heron’s downfall in popularity forces the tearing of her conscience to fully come to surface. She decides she doesn’t want to be plastic anymore and comes clean on all her treachery, having to return to square one with most of her relationships. 

After having to join the math team and winning the state championship with the phrase “the limit does not exist,” Heron shows up to the Spring Fling late, still adorned in her nerd getup. There they announce Heron, much to her surprise, as queen of the dance. On stage, she accepts the crown and proclaims the need for understanding, toleration, and forgiveness. 

Heron says everyone is a king and a queen that night and shocks everyone by breaking the plastic crown into pieces and distributing them to everyone. Perhaps the breaking of plastic is the intended metaphor, but what I saw was the rejection of kings and genesis of giving power to the people. 

Heron practically proclaims the rule of democracy, tries to break up factions — cliques — and gives the queenship’s power to all, making the rule of the high school be one of the people, by the people, and for the people. 

Thus the people, attempting to rise above that state of nature where passions control them and the mightiest lead, decide to come together to form a compact. They decide to use man’s highest capacity, that limitless capacity of rationality, to make their society best for all men. 

Based on this, Heron is like that venerable person of the American tradition, George Washington, because she cedes the power she could have kept.

After this speech, the highschool dance continues and all are happy. All the cliques mix together into the melting pot through the power of that compact, which brings about equality of conditions and toleration. 

Now, you may ask, what of Regina George? Well, like the modern monarchs, she becomes a simple facade. She too is at the dance, but physically disabled — wearing a neck brace — and too goofy to properly function, being high on painkillers. 

Overall, “Mean Girls”) was not a very good movie. I would not recommend going to see it. 3/10.