Movie review: 'Moana' remake degrades the original
by Fred Topel · UPILOS ANGELES, July 8 (UPI) -- The live-action Moana, in theaters Friday, is better than Moana 2 because it is still based on the original Moana's script. However, it renders that script in a degraded form.
Moana (Catherine Laga'aia) defies her father, Chief Tui's (John Tui) orders to never leave their island. When their resources run dry, Moana sets sail to find demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) and restore the Heart of Te Fiti to the goddess from whom Maui stole it.
The animated film was lush in its depiction of Polynesian culture. Moana defies patriarchal culture like the best Disney princess.
Coming only 10 years later, there's far less of a case for making The Jungle Book with photoreal animals or even Aladdin with a genie interacting with live-action. Representing Pacific Island culture even takes a backseat to unconvincing visual effects.
You might expect a live-action Moana to at least film on a real island. Location work in Hawaii is credited, along with Georgia, British Columbia and Sydney, Australia.
What becomes clear is that even much of Moana's home island is only a backdrop on an LED screen or added in post-production to fill in a green screen. At least sea level looks like a real beach, but the higher Moana, Tui or Gramma Tala (Rena Owen) climb, the more glaring the artificiality becomes.
That's almost irrelevant because Moana soon sets sail, and no one expects filmmakers to put a young actor on a catamaran in the ocean. So Moana's canoe is floating in a tank in front of, yes, another screen.
What's wild is Moana and Maui's journey encompasses day, night and sunset. They change the light when the background changes, but the unnatural source remains the same.
The real sun changes direction when the sky changes. When night falls in this movie, it looks like someone flicked the dimmer switch.
Filming in a contained environment does not require filming indoors. There are outdoor water tanks, and even the real sky can be manipulated in post-production.
Worse, the ocean is animated with worse digital effects than The Perfect Storm accomplished in 2000. Storm was recreating actual waves. Moana has a living ocean that manipulates live-action actors, less convincingly than The Abyss in 1989.
Moana's adventure never feels epic because all the seams are showing. When Moana and Maui confront the crab Tomatoa (voice of Jemaine Clement), there's no sense of danger when every character is on a different plane.
To give some credit where it is due, Te Fiti is a good effect. But whatever they're using to fill those screens is a lot dimmer than the tools they used for the animated film.
Calling Moana live-action is a misnomer anyway. There are actual live actors, which is something not even The Lion King remake can claim, but they're in environments more artificial than the animated movie because of lackluster modern visuals.
Hopefully, audiences can look back on films like Jaws or even Waterworld with appreciation. They may have been troubled productions, but what they captured on the real ocean makes a difference.
The use of screens is not going away, but there is a difference between using screens to show something new and using them to redo what has already been rendered as beautiful art.
The script itself also compromises the original. The addition of a single line makes Maui's return feel more like a contrived plot function than a sincere redemption.
Laga'aia seems like she was sincerely inspired by the original, and the remake provides an opportunity for other Pacific Islander actors. However, Disney hasn't made another movie with Aladdin stars Mena Massoud or Naomi Scott so we'll see if they champion the culture beyond the Moana intellectual property.
There will be a third animated Moana and hopefully it will be conceived as a film, rather than edited from a streaming series like Moana 2. It would be the first Moana follow-up that is not picked over from used parts.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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