It’s Disney remake time! Aren’t you excited to see the same movie over again? Both Paul and myself react to the live-action remake of Disney’s MOANA, now playing in cinemas.
About: In Disney’s live-action Moana (2026), teenage Moana (Catherine Lagaʻaia) voyages beyond the reef of her island of Motunui with the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson). Together, they embark on an epic quest to return the stolen heart of the goddess Te Fiti and save her people from a devastating blight.
Paul’s Reaction: What the world probably doesn’t need right now is a (more or less) live action remake of the beloved Moana movies. It adds nothing to the cannon, if you will, and represents the sort of safe unoriginal content that the risk-averse folks at Disney prefer to invest in. It’s not that the film is totally without charm, but it can’t hold a candle to the charms of the original animation hit and its sequel. In today’s marketplace, it has a few things going against it:
1. It is often a musical, which despite the recent success of the Wicked movies, is not a genre that resonates much outside of animation and Bollywood movies (Lin-Manuel Miranda’s catchy tunes notwithstanding).
2. It celebrates diversity, and the Polynesian culture, not something that makes Americans line up around the block in this age of ICE.
3. The plot gets overwhelmed by expensive CGI effects in the final half hour, a predictable approach to filmmaking that is leading to superhero movie fatigue.
4. It opens in a very crowded corridor for family films, competing with Disney’s own far more appealing Toy Story 5 and Minions and Monsters.
Other than that, Catherine Laga’aia is an appropriately feisty heroine, Dwayne Johnson has fun laughing at his own demi-god persona, and Rena Owen (from the classic Māori film Once Were Warriors) is wonderful as the inspirational Gramma. Too bad this may join the ranks of Dumbo and Snow White as totally unnecessary intellectual property mine stripping.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Jason’s Reaction: This live action MOANA of course is another entry into Disney doing live-action remakes of their animated features, but this one only comes ten years after the vastly superior animated feature and feels more bizarre of an entry being so close in time frame. The only one I recall liking out of all of these is Jon Favreau’s THE JUNGLE BOOK and that one was at least decades away from its origin film. Over the years we have had remakes of varying forms, with a decent one like ALADDIN where filmmaker Guy Ritchie (!) did manage to try a few new things, all the way to the borderline offensive THE LION KING in 2018 which was a complete shot for shot remake.
In Moana, this is mostly shot-for-shot with a few sequences diverting a bit from the source film, but overall the effect is seeing the exact same movie over again. The 2016 MOANA still exists in many ways; you can stream it on Disney+, buy the Blu Ray/4k disc or even own the movie digitally, like I do.
When you take this into consideration, I don’t know who this is made for. It seems like Disney is banking on lazy moviegoers who already loved the animated movie to see the whole thing all over again because they aren’t interested in seeing movies outside of their comfort zone….and most of this remake is animated anyways, right down to its animal characters who look just as animated. The visual look here is pretty stiff, with most of the actors looking like they are acting off of green-screen and barely even reacting to the visual world around them as it’s just going to be added in later.
With that said, it isn’t all dreadful; a few of the performances here are solid. Catherine Laga’aia as Moana is quite good here; she looks a lot like the original Moana with a lovely singing voice and at least tries very hard to work with the material. I also quite liked Rena Owen as Gramma Tala who has a few nice scenes especially with Moana, along with some supporting performances. And yet Dwayne Johnson, who is one of the producers and is one of the big reasons of this remake, looks tired and angry throughout, which is a shame because I always loved him in many various performances over the years and just doesn’t look like he wants to be here.
Of course there are arguments for remakes; I watch a lot of Indian movies every year that are basic ripoffs (the recent ALPHA, with Alia Bhatt — which Paul Gratton reviewed for us recently — is a prime example) of American movies. And yet I feel no love for movies or storytelling here and a complete corporate overlord trying to phish moviegoers into paying a full ticket price for a repeat viewing.
Rating: 2 out of 10
