At the end of the movie “Moana,” released eight years ago, our brave Polynesian heroine, who is not a princess, defeats the giant lava monster Te Ka and restores the heart of Te Fiti, the moss-green goddess of nature. . Moana, an eager but untested island girl, becomes a pathfinder, restoring her lush tropical home and discovering, along the way, that her people have always been travelers. She was also associated with the bickering but insecure cold-bodied demigod Maui, which helped restore his strength as well. (Moana was, at its core, a buddy movie.) Overall, it gets a lot done, which might leave you wondering: What’s left for Moana to do in the sequel?
That’s a silly question, of course, since the premise of a movie like “Moana 2” is that a team of screenwriters will put their heads together and come up with a whole lot of amazing new world-saving solutions for Moana to jump through. The movie had barely started when disaster struck us. Moana, once again voiced by Auli’i Cravalho in a pearly voice, yearns to search for people from other islands, but discovers that this is not possible. The evil god Nalu has placed a curse on Motovito, the island that once connected everyone. (How does the island connect everyone? Oh, never mind.) Moana must now travel to the distant seas of Oceania to remove that curse by fighting Nalu.
I wouldn’t put this in the “same thing, different day” category, but the story is designed to hit very familiar beats. (This is also what Stephen K. Bannon, for example, calls the ideal of globalization.) The difference is that Moana actually grows up to be a heroine who finds her faith, believes in herself, and all those other good things. She didn’t have much of an internal journey left. So, much more than the first film, “Moana 2” becomes a fairy tale of non-interior animation.
In “Moana,” I always felt like the scene in which Moana, Maui, and their animal companions (the lovable pig Pua, the loony rooster Hehe) fight against Kakamora, coconut pirates who look like souvenirs in a new Tahitian store, was dragging its feet. Film down. In “Moana 2,” Moana travels on her beautiful flatboat with a crew of one-toned human companions – evil brat Lotto (Rose Mateo), miserly farmer Kelly (David Fine), and moon-eyed man Mooney (Hualalai). Chung), who worships Maui to the point of having a crush on him – when she runs back to Kakamura. But the next scene is actually the most exciting in the movie so far. They team up with the Coconut Brigade to defeat a clam that is so huge that it is literally a mountain split in half. It’s a gorgeous image to stare at, and there are other evocative creatures in “Moana 2,” like a towering sea monster or this film’s equivalent of a lava demon — the god Nalu, a purple light force embedded in oceanic tornadoes that emit such power. Strong Knocking Tattoo shipment direct from Maui.
“Moana 2” features three directors, David J. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana LeDoux Miller, none of whom have made a film before. They present the film with impressive standard artistic flair, and a flow of action that keeps the eyeballs dancing. However, this is also a musical that Lin-Manuel Miranda, having launched a new branch of his career as a Disney tunesmith with “Moana,” chose not to return to. And I can understand why: his “Moana” songs were unforgettable (especially “How Far I’ll Go” and “You’re Welcome”), and he only stepped up his game with “Encanto,” a more inspired and complex entertainment. But Miranda, I think, realized that he had already done so He said Moana’s story is told through the song and I didn’t need to rehash it.
The songs on “Moana 2,” by Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, are fun and catchy, with an electrifying island drum bounce, but most of them sound like Lin-Manual knockoffs. The early melancholy number about the ocean, “Beyond,” is good in a general way, but it’s not “How Far Will I Go.” “What could be better than this?” Featuring fake rapping, “Get Lost” has a catchy hook. But none of the songs evoke that indelible quality that sealed the story of “Moana” in our hearts. Maui still looks and talks like Jack Black on protein supplements, and Dwayne Johnson’s performance is, once again, a narrow-minded, antagonistic charm. The character of Matangi, a sharp-tongued goddess whose Ohimai Fraser seems like the reincarnation of Downtown Julie Brown, is introduced, but she’s offered very little to do. There’s also a lot of colorful slime.
“Moana 2” is a good movie, an above-average kids’ rollercoaster, and a piece of pure product in a way that the first “Moana” at its best surpassed. The new movie exhausts you to win you over; It’s a delivery system effective enough to bring inspiration to follow your dreams to great holiday success. When Maui, in one funny line, tells Moana that even though she’s not a princess, “a lot of people think you’re a princess,” this is the movie, in a nice way, that has both the cake of a rebellious heroine and the cake of a rebellious heroine. Eat it too. At this point, Moana seems ready to step up to the island queen, and I have a feeling she’ll get the chance. Could another tropical disaster, test of the independent spirit, and benign trouble-making spasm on Maui be far behind?