I know a LOT of people is OBSESSED with the original movie, but, come on people, accept the truth! The original Little Mermaid was a TERRIBLE movie to begin with; the plot is just too dumb, there was almost no story to begin with and the characters were really empty... The ONLY good thing about the original movie was the animation, because the drawings were beautiful...
So I thought they were going to rewrite the plot a little bit, kinda of how they did it with Maleficent, to give the story more "sense" or anything interesting, but they didn't... Its the exact same empty story with hollow characters... So they actually did a great job with this movie, the only bad thing is that a bad story without the beautiful original animation makes it even worse...
The fact that they made a black Ariel had nothing to do with the movie being bad, though it was VERY weird that prince Eric was an exact copy of the original prince Eric (even with the dimple) but they changed Ariel...
The main actress wasn't that bad, she acted just as dumb, boring and empty as the original Ariel was... The only good actress/character in the whole movie was the girl that represented Ursula when she was in a human form and that lasted about 5 minutes...