The live action remake never really makes an argument for why it needs to exist, but it helps that it is just recreating a masterpiece.
I saw the original Moana on the final day of 2016, an exhausting year that proved to be a portent of things to come. In the first five minutes, a toddler Moana wanders onto the beach and sees a sea turtle struggling to make it to the ocean. She assists the turtles trek, providing it shade and fighting off birds. Her act of kindness is witnessed by the ocean itself, who chooses her for a life of adventure due to her curiosity, bravery and kindness. It a perfectly executed moment, and was the first (but far from final) time that the best film from Musker and Clements’ storied career made me openly sob.
This moment is recreated in Thomas Kail’s live action redux, releasing to theaters July 10th. Of course it is, because every moment in 2016’s Moana is recreated in loving, devoted detail in Kail’s 2026 version. Thus is the nature of these things, to create a fascimile of the film you already know down to minute details. The difference, at least from the perspective of viewers of a certain age, is the turn around between the original and the new one. When The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast were recreated, they were remaking films from the time that I was a child. Even longer for Cinderella or the nightmarish Snow White. The gap between the two Moanas is only ten years. It makes the degree to which the new is a straight retelling of the old feel weirder and somehow more craven.
It raises an ongoing question about the ongoing Disney live action remake project: why? If you are just going to make the same movie again (and in this case, down to some of the same cast members,) what is the point? The obvious answer is to make more money off of the nostalgia of the original, even if that nostalgia has increasingly shorter half life. But in the case of Moana, that math seems to not be paying off.
For the uninitiated, Moana tells the story of an adventurous titular young woman, born to the Polynesian island village of Motunui. The edict of Motunui is that people must not sail beyond the reef, but Moana (this time played by newcomer Catherine Laga’aia) feels a call to travel far from home. She is given a mission by the ocean itself: find the demigod Maui, return the heart of the Island Goddess Tefiti, and save her island from devastation.
The only problem being once she finds Maui (Dwayne Johnson, reprising), he turns out to be a pig-headed, conceited jerk who is more interested in regaining his own power than assisting Moana in her quest. The center of the movie is their relationship, and how he guides her to be the hero she longs to be, and she guides him back to being the hero he once was.
The benefit that the new Moana has is that the original is an excellent film, story, and emotional experience. It is filled with great Lin Manuel-Miranda songs (which Kail has familiarity with how to stage) and is a propulsive adventure that captures you the entire time. So using it as a blueprint, there is only so much you can fail as long as you have competent performers at the helm.
For the most part, the performances work. Laga’aia has the lionshare to burden, and while her performance can verge into a bit of imitation Auli’i Cravalho’s original, she handles the task of physically embodying the character well enough.
Dwayne Johnson is more hit or miss. To be clear, his voice work for Maui in the original Moana is among his best acting in his career. He is charming, annoying, and pulls in enough pathos when the moment calls for it to create a complex portrait of the self-conscious demigod. He clearly has a handle on Maui’s inner self, but that sensitive core comes less easily to him when he has to embody across his actual face. Johnson can portray vulnerable; he did it expertly in last year The Smashing Machine. But here we get a bit too much of the movie star, the Rock persona peeking through in the margins for that softer undercurrent to feel quite as earned.
This is director Kail’s feature debut. His background is in Broadway, most notably directing Hamilton, which shows through. His staging and direction can sometimes play for the largest melodrama of a moment, which meshes surprisingly well with the remit of making a live-action cartoon. And he has a great skeleton to mount on top of it; the original Moana is a near perfect film that is now proven to be something that is sustainable across formats.
My wife made the perfect analogy: watching the live action Moana is a similar experience to seeing your favorite Broadway show remounted or adapted. There might be some performances that bump for you, or pieces that feel slightly out of place. And it will never quite match up to the original completely, if only because it created the blueprint. But at the core you still love the heart of it. Kail’s remounting isn’t a disaster, and sometimes will cause the same goosebumps of the original at its emotional heights. But it can never quite live up to the original. The best it can hope for is to do honor to the original, do it justice, and not rock the boat to the point it tips over.
Kail and his cast walk that line fairly well, not allowing their adaptation to be an outright embarrassment, while also never quite justifying why a new film had to exist at all. It isn’t better than the original; how could it be? But it does honor the work of those that came before. For a film that has no reason to exist, it is inoffensive at its core.
