by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Catherine Laga’aia, Dwayne Johnson, John Tui, Rena Owen, Frankie Adams
Intro:
As a mild switch-up to the original, it’s enjoyable enough …
Much like the gap between commercial holidays like Easter, Halloween, and Christmas seems to be getting shorter, so too has the gap between Disney’s animated films and their seemingly-inevitable live-action remakes. Last year’s Lilo & Stitch marked only a twenty-three-year distance between productions (and an equally-wide distance in overall quality), and now we have a remake of a film that’s not even ten years old … which had a sequel just two years ago, although much like audiences and critics alike, chances are they themselves completely forgot it existed. If Disney corporate embraces the meme any harder, we’re likely to see a live-action Frozen remake releasing alongside one of its own sequels.
This film’s mere existence is already a might puzzling, but where it gets weirder is how, of all of the Disney remakes, the new Moana has the least alterations from the original text. A few quips have been added or subtracted, one-off gag characters like the Dancing Boy have been removed, and some of the supporting cast have been smoothed out a little, like John Tui as a less-aggressive Chief Tui, but the vast majority of dialogue, plot and character beats, and even the music are word-for-word the same as the original.
By that same token, the original Moana is one of the better modern Disney Princess films, and this remake still succeeds at hitting those same notes. Catherine Laga’aia delivers Moana’s dialogue and lyrics beautifully, and while Dwayne Johnson’s hair might take a bit to look past without giggling, his return to one of the few anti-heroes that actually works with his recurring image problem shows him as fun and braggadocious as ever. The best part of the original film, the combative philosophical tension between Moana and Maui, is intact, and when it digs into the recursive nature of myth and culture, defined by well-meaning decisions by individuals leading to calamitous collective problems, heart strings are still given a mighty tug.
Then there’s the real reason for this film’s creation (beyond immediacy so that actor/producer Dwayne was still willing and physically able to reprise his role): the live-action visuals. Director Thomas Kail, making his feature debut after his breakout with the 2020 proshot of Hamilton, uses that theatrical experience well in how he and DP Óscar Faura photograph the actors, both in song and in speech, as well as the detail put into Moana’s home village.
Like Lilo & Stitch, there’s a certain underlying notion that their respective depictions of non-Western cultures is somehow more authentic just because it’s done physically rather than animated (an annoying presumption behind pretty much all of these remakes, frankly), but getting to see the detail work in the costuming, architecture, and even the dancing is still pretty neat. Even the CGI fits as a visualisation both of the natural world and its many supernatural corners, along with some novel ideas like using phenakistoscope animation for the updated rendition of ‘You’re Welcome’.
Moana is one of the least egregious of the crop of Disney remakes. It doesn’t try to fix what isn’t broken, nor underutilise the medium involved. But that’s also what makes this the most pointless, save for maybe some of the Disney+ exclusives, as it’s so one-to-one that it’s difficult to think of legitimate reasons to check this out, as opposed to just watching the original again; even How to Train Your Dragon, which was also quite direct as a remake, delivered a different artistic experience than its source, whereas this feels more like a light script polish and CGI overcoat that just happened to cost upwards of $200 million.
As a mild switch-up to the original, it’s enjoyable enough, but as the latest in a pattern of disdain- bordering-on-outright-hostility towards the medium that Disney built their legacy on, “it’s less painful than previous attempts” isn’t a strong enough wind to carry this ship.
