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Disney's Live-Action Moana is a Predictably Lifeless and Dry Replication

I’m really just punishing myself at this point. Atoning for my sins and mistakes. It’s that little part of me that hates myself that drives me to see the live-action version of Moana rather than doing something productive like budgeting out the rest of my summer or something more entertaining like doing my laundry. There is no godly reason to be at a mostly empty theatre (a telling sign) on a Sunday night to partake in this drivel and I found myself distracted on a number of occasions pondering my life’s choices.
But it is also worth pondering Disney’s. This Moana is an amazing example of the studio’s increased and out-of-touch hubris in the 2020s. Where previous live-action remakes of their animated classics came at times enough removed that the original films in question had attained that status organically over the course of multiple decades. For a lot of us millennials, Lilo & Stitch felt unusually recent when they came for it last year, the first source for such a remake to originate in the 2000s. Moana however originated in 2016 -at merely a decade-old (and the first Disney remake of a CG-animated film), it hasn’t established its legacy the way those other Disney movies have. Certainly it can, the last animated Disney film to truly be something special; but it is not old enough to really be thought of as a classic or even a decent nostalgia play. The kids who grew up with Moana are still kids essentially -hell, Auli’i Cravalho is still young enough to have played the part again if she’d wanted to (thank god she didn’t). Further, its popularity hasn’t really had the chance to die down. Even Frozen only started to in the last couple years.
It was a baffling choice to make this movie, one driven entirely by cynicism and the hope of an easy profit. And that is blatantly obvious in every facet of the finished product in which only the barest effort appears to have been made and nobody but a returning Dwayne Johnson is all that invested. Like Gerard Butler in How to Train Your Dragon, he is more than happy to repeat all the lines he recorded years ago but in a very bad wig.
And it is indeed fairly identical to that original movie -every scene is seemingly replicated, most of the dialogue appears to be directly recited even down to the pacing; the runtime is within ten minutes of its source and that likely just comes down to a little visual padding in the action and song scenes and one slightly different prologue. Of course the visuals are vastly inferior, even by Disney remake standards where they not only appear dry and unoriginal but cheap. The movie was shot at least partially in Hawaii but you could believe it was all done in a Georgia warehouse given the muted colours and deeply unconvincing water effects. There are some suspecting A.I. usage and it wouldn't be shocking, especially for those flashback musical sequences centred on the Polynesian ancestors that already makes for such an awkward device in live-action. There is no sense of tangibility, and the figures, all apparently Polynesian, removed from that lens of animation reflect starkly a cultural dissonance to the material that was much better hidden by that original film. This is not how they would choose to represent themselves. Everything in the movie just looks artificial and cheap -several creature effects like the chicken Heihei and the Kakamora are barely distinguishable from their slightly less "realistic" counterparts. Tamatoa the giant crab on the other hand looks unnecessarily hideous.
Struggling to interact authentically with all of these is Catherine Laga'aia as this live-action Moana, sadly a blanker slate than just about any of the Disney recasts preceding her. She faced an uphill battle to match both the conviction and passion of Cravalho's performance and the strong, expressive animation that has made Moana so popular a character. She is also not directed particularly well by Thomas Kail, the Broadway director of both of Lin-Manuel Miranda's big hits but who has never made a movie before -shooting her in ways designed to mimic the original and providing no opportunities for Laga'aia to bring something of herself to the part. However she doesn't have the capacity to make much of what she is given either, and the vital emotional scenes related to Moana's journey and determination are so hollow and disaffecting in her hands. Johnson though is worse. The wig has been mocked to death, but it is only the tip of the iceberg on a performance that is even more low-effort. We all know Johnson is a big, muscular guy yet he is somehow unbelievable in his own physique here, the tattoos probably a big reason for that. The film keeps the gag of Maui’s tattoos being their own living entity and in particular the sassy relationship he has with a miniature tattoo of himself (which resembles the animated Maui), but this character is never allowed to be in a wide shot with Johnson likely for the reason it would look incredibly bad and silly -so he is instead confined to awkward close-ups on an approximation of Johnson’s chest. There is a touch of embarrassment that comes through in this Maui and nowhere near the enthusiasm Johnson demonstrated as the animated equivalent. Despite him being a force in getting this film made, it is in fact one of his saddest performances of late.
No doubt the biggest thing hurting Moana though is its lack of imagination or ingenuity. Just like How to Train Your Dragon last year, it really demonstrates how debilitating the crutch of mimicry is. None of Kail's choices are made with artistic intent -no thought is given on how best to relate a beat or a scene for its own sake. There are musical sequences for example that might look good if Kail dared to shoot them in a different way to how they were presented in cartoon form ten years ago. There is a way to do "How Far I'll Go" that works for this environment, but Kail and his handlers are too beholden to the rigidity of what came before, unaware that even within an empty remake as this, audiences crave some variation -even an audience as small as the one I saw this movie with, wherein a few kids were easily distracted and not all that engaged.
Kids will not be interested by this version of Moana, which has nothing to offer them not already available in a cuter, more colourful and funny package. The only impression it stands to leave are the nightmares off of Tamatoa's new design. Like most of these remakes, it is still largely animated, just to a more intentionally boring aesthetic -most starkly on display in action scenes in which Johnson and Laga'aia struggle to move and react like their animated counterparts through busy, dark, and chaotic set-pieces such as the absurdly elaborate Kakamoa barge and the angry living volcano Te Fiti in the climax.
This movie is both a misguided and a deeply cynical enterprise that cost way more than it was ever worth (and which is not in any way evident on screen in how tired, banal, and lifeless the film looks). There is no viable excuse for it beyond that bare scrounging more money out of witless consumers of Moana ‘content’, no matter what. It may well be the zenith of Disney’s remake trend, as it is the first to treat its original text as such sacred scripture that nothing can be strayed from in any notable way. It is not the worst of these films but it is far and away the emptiest -a crown it gladly takes from The Lion King. I would say that nobody should bother with it, but if my experience and its revealing flop status is any indication, the general public has already taken that advice. Good. 

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