What’s It About

Live-action adaptation of the 2016 Disney animated film ‘Moana’. An adventurous teenager sails out on a daring mission to save her people. During her journey, Moana meets the once-mighty demigod Maui, who guides her in her quest to become a master way-finder. Together they sail across the open ocean on an action-packed voyage, encountering enormous monsters and impossible odds. Along the way, Moana fulfills the ancient quest of her ancestors and discovers the one thing she always sought: her own identity.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Here we go again. A new live-action Disney movie. Moana, a movie about a girl chosen by the sea to fix her people’s chances of survival. I already knew what I would find, and I still walked away a little more tired than I expected. Disney keeps doing this dance, and the steps are easy to spot. Take a beloved cartoon, dress it up in real skin and real sand, charge full ticket price, and call it new. The 2016 animated Moana is barely ten years old and still one of the most-watched movies on Disney+. There was no gap in time calling for this. There was no outdated drawing style begging to be replaced with real faces, the way old hand-drawn films got refreshed by CGI. The only real difference here is that actual people now stand where pixels used to be, and even that difference does not add much. Nearly every scene plays out exactly the way it did in the cartoon, line for line. If a student turned in a paper this close to someone else’s work, a teacher would call it copying, not creativity. The story has not changed one bit. Moana is a teenage girl living on the island of Motunui, and she feels the ocean calling her even though her father, Chief Tui, forbids her from crossing the reef. When her island starts dying, she sails out to find Maui, a demigod who once stole a magic stone from the goddess Te Fiti. There are some coconut people, a giant, self-centered crab, a lava monster, and a very persistent ocean determined to keep them together. None of this will surprise anyone who saw the original. The new film even keeps the same songs, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and drops in one new track called “Along the Way”, where original Moana voice actor Auli’i Cravalho passes the torch to the new lead in a scene meant to feel emotional, but instead feels like a marketing moment. Here is where I want to slow down, because this is the part that matters most to me as a critic who pays close attention to who gets real chances on screen and who just gets used for the picture. Catherine Laga’aia, an Australian teenager making her first film, plays Moana, and she beat out thirty-two thousand other girls for the role. That is not a small thing. Her dad is a working Samoan actor. She carries real Pacific Islander roots into a story about Pacific Islander people. Her singing is natural sounding, and her smile does not look forced. But here is my worry. A shot-for-shot remake gives a young actor almost no room to make the role her own. Every line reading, every pause, every beat of the story is already locked in place by the cartoon that came before it. Laga’aia is not being handed a character to build. She is being handed a costume to wear inside somebody else’s finished house. That is the difference between giving an actor real depth and just giving her a spot on the poster. Jemaine Clement returns as Tamatoa, now in full costume instead of just voice work, and he still brings life to the role. Dwayne Johnson slips back into Maui, wrapped in a heavy bodysuit covered in moving tattoo ink and a long wig that looks pulled from a costume closet. He does not seem bored exactly, but he also does not seem to be reaching for anything new. He played this character loose and fun in 2016, and he plays it loose and fun again now, just with more sweat involved. The visuals are where the movie truly stumbles. The ocean itself is still built almost entirely with computer graphics, so a movie sold to us as more real actually spends most of its runtime looking like a video game cutscene. The warm, sunny colors that made the animated island feel alive are traded for a duller, more washed-out look. The work of costume designer Liz McGregor in creating costumes for the characters is commendable, and in this regard, the movie is characterized by excellent aesthetics. At the same time, actress Rena Owen gives a lovely performance as Gramma Tala, who is the first to encourage the heroine, Moana, to go to the sea. However, excellent costumes and one remarkable performance cannot rescue the film, which is clearly lacking creativity. Director Thomas Kail, known for his work on the production of Hamilton, does not take any chances from the very beginning to the very end and does not allow the story to unfold by itself. By the end, I kept thinking about all the other Disney redo films that came before this one, some worse, a few better, none of them truly necessary. This Moana lands right in the middle of that pile. It is not the disaster that Snow White was last year, and it is not embarrassing the way Aladdin’s genie once was. It is simply extra. A talented new actor deserved a story built with her in mind, not one traced over old lines. Families looking for a fun afternoon will likely still enjoy it, especially kids meeting this story for the first time. But anyone who already loves the original has nothing new waiting for them here, only a familiar song sung a little quieter than before.

OUR RATING – AN ALOHA 5