Director: Thomas Kail
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Rena Owen, John Tui, Frankie Adams, Jemaine Clement, Catherine Laga’aia
Screenplay: Jared Bush, Dana Ledoux Miller
115 mins. Rated PG for action/peril, some scary images, rude humor and brief thematic elements.

Disney’s string of live-action remakes of animated favorites is practically a money-printing machine at this point, and they’re targeting the most recent examples with Moana, a remake of the 2016 animated (dare I say) classic. Disney knows what they want, and they’ve pulled Thomas Kail, who helmed the filming of the stage hit Hamilton to helm this new vision, but there’s really very little “new” to it at all, heralding a soulless shell of the original.

Moana (Catherine Laga’aia), the daughter of the chief of Motunui, has been chosen by the water to embark on a highly dangerous mission to return the heart of Te Fiti, the mysterious goddess of nature, to its rightful. She knows little of wayfinding, but she’ll be joined by loyal rooster Heihei and the demigod himself Maui (Dwayne Johnson, The Smashing Machine). Together, they must retrieve Maui’s magic fish hook and get him to the living island of Te Fiti in order to right the balance of the ocean and restore health to the food and land of Moana’s people.

Moana isn’t a remake of the original, nor is it an adaptation. It’s a literal translation, shot-for-shot, moment-for-moment…a recreation of the 2016 film, and a lesser version of it in just about any conceivable way. Disney hired a director most known for translating Hamilton from a stage show to a…filmed stage show. That’s what they wanted here: to use the same script, to use the same shot composition, and sometimes even the same performers, to recreate the original film from the top down. While some might enjoy that, seeing their love for the original film replicated all over again, I continue to find it a tedious and artistically devoid idea that studios just keep on doing because it makes money more often than not. As I’ve said with some recent remakes, some of these movies are just carbon copies of the original but somehow longer and duller. At least Moana gets closer to the original’s run time, but there’s not much to excite here.

Laga’aia is pretty strong as Moana, and I appreciate the original voice actress, after being asked to return, turning it down so that the role can be filled by another gifted and worthy actress, and Rena Owen (Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith) is absolutely excellent as Moana’s Gramma Tala, but most of the cast is just filling stock roles and, strangely enough, trying to just emulate the previous portrayals. This was the case with Universal’s How to Train Your Dragon remake. At least when a new Shakespeare adaptation is released, the performers often try to make the characters their own. That’s not the case for most of Moana. In fact, the most egregious examples here come from returning performers Dwayne Johnson and Jemaine Clement (Avatar: The Way of Water) as the crustacean hoarder Tamatoa. These performances are more than just hollow recreations, they actively take away from the potential magic of revisiting this property in the live action realm. Some might argue that only these two actors can play these characters and it would be impossible to even try. Hell, I was somewhat in agreement back when James Earl Jones returned as Mufasa for the live action The Lion King, but I’ve since come to realize that the best of Disney’s live action films have been due to trying something new against all odds and seeing what kind of classic Disney magic can come from it. The best part of Will Smith’s performance as the Genie in Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin is simply that he isn’t Robin Williams and isn’t trying to be. Finding a replacement for the late great Robin Williams is a herculean task, and they went a completely different way, and the movie succeeds on that front. Let me be clear: someone else can play Maui, and someone else can play Tamatoa, and nothing. I’m sure some audiences were uncertain about James Bond having a new actor as well, and look how that turned out over the decades.

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt so much if the technical side of Moana was excellent, but very little of the environment felt real, and there were several truly ugly pieces of CG backgrounds here, including a CG matte of the island behind Moana and her father’s conversation at the top of the mountain, and a ridiculously bad bit of effects for Tamatoa’s spinning during Shiny while Maui tries to free his hook from the beast’s back. I kept being reminded of the stunningly beautiful Pirates of the Caribbean films, particularly the ones from Gore Verbinski, that made an effort from its fantasy ocean elements feeling real and lived in. I didn’t have that here, and I’ve read that this was filmed in both Atlanta and Hawaii, but I have to assume a bulk of it was Atlanta because this whole affair had a green screen background look.

Moana is a cover band performance that includes some but not all of the original musicians and they’ve stopped caring about the music. It pains me to say it because I’m a big fan of Cinderella and Aladdin, and I can even give some credit to Maleficent for trying something new, but this feels like a cash grab, and it is one, and it’ll likely be a success, but in my mind, I see a more ambitious live action Moana, and that’s not this. It’s SAFE, and it’s DULL, and I’m just really disappointed by the whole affair. At least Laga’aia and Owen uplift the film, but it’s not enough.

2/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• For more Moana: Moana 2