Moana 2 (Dave Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller, November 27, 2024) Movie • Page 3

Nephews all loved it. It was mid, but nothing truly offensive or bad. Knock-off Lin Manuel just shows how much he was cooking with the songs for the first one. The Jemaine crab got the biggest laugh and easily the best joke in the movie.

 

Disney just back that cash dump truck up to Lin Manuel’s house and have him do the music for all your movies. His style is just built for it

 

I went to see Moana 2 earlier on and while it's not better than the original but it was still a great film but I have to say the reviews and the hate online for it is so forced and fake it's unreal.. going to the cinema is about escapism from the daily grind and I had a long and tiring week at work honestly watching Moana 2 help me mentally escape from it all and seeing kids with their parents and teenagers having the best time and talking about it afterwards being really excited after the mid credit scene was shown is what going to the cinema is all about.

 

Surprised at the huge box office for this film since Disney barely advertised it. I forget it even released on Wednesday because of the lack of ads I’ve seen for it.

 

I think because the original holds the record for the most viewed Disney movie ever on Disney+ so I imagine when the announcement for Moana 2 happened, kids must of told their parents to take them to see it! That's what my god daughter said to her folks and they were like oh ok!

 

Kids liked it. Definitely not as good as the first

 

I saw this with my kids yesterday and, while my six year old had a good time because she was also seeing it with her grandma who came with us, my eight year old son said he pretty much hated it and the first one is his favorite Disney movie. My wife and I, along with her parents, were also pretty indifferent to it as well and the displeasure with it wasn’t “fake” or “forced”. There were other families in the theater who got up as the film was ending and looked at each other like “not sure what that was” and I don’t think those responses are invalid either.

Going to the movies can be about more than “escapism”. While that is a draw, many also like to be challenged and entertained in a number of ways. I love the first Moana for its themes of female empowerment (peep that conch shell on top of the phallic stone tower) and identity of self, and also for its allegory of assault, trauma, and healing. I got very little from this film. What I got was Bob Iger attempting to squeeze every dollar he could out of an established franchise with a built in fanbase because his last gambit, Wish, flopped and he had nothing else to put out this year thanks to last year’s strikes which he also played a role in full of corporate greed and self preservation. He took the hard work of a whole massive crew of people and slashed it to bits to give us an incoherent mess of a sequel that has very little going for it in the way of motivation or discernible plot.

Tug at the thread of this story even a little and the whole thing unravels. Its cynical mid-credits setup for the sequel felt like the story we should have gotten for this movie. It’s a middle film of a “trilogy” that was never intended to be the middle film of a trilogy - instead becoming Frankensteined into one - and so the end result is a story that is ultimately meandering at best. The crew on Moana’s boat are cut down so drastically from what we should have gotten in the series that I barely knew who any of them were. Maui shows up intermittently and the cuts to his character usually left me thinking “okay so this was cut out of a Maui-centric episode of the series and - ope - here’s the cliffhanger ending of one of those said episodes made all the more clear by the very awkward transition to another scene without him and completely disconnected to anything going on with his character.” Moana’s wants and character arc are fuzzy, especially when compared to the excellent work establishing her in the first film; in fact the writing here seems to often forget or ignore her arc in the first film altogether. The whole thing is relegated to “well now I’m conflicted because this time I’ve got to go even farther than last time,” which is quite literally said almost verbatim onscreen. But that was Moana’s whole thing in the first one. The ancestors come to her in this one to tell her she needs to travel “beyond” or whatever and reconnect the islands and other people out there or else her people will die off on this one island, but at the end of the first film that’s exactly what she was doing. They literally showed her doing it. She’d travel to a new island, establish a new community, and then depart again with a whole fleet of people. The beginning of this one seems to negate that ending, retroactively making the triumphant ending of the first film feel hollow. So she went on this incredible journey in the first one and it…achieved nothing? We’re told all throughout the film that there’s this God out there who’s an existential threat and then…we do not meet him until, again, the cynical mid-credits scene where he stands up and literally says “it’s only just beginning.” Ho hum. Okay. There’s supposed to be a compelling story buried somewhere in here about the value of teamwork and having people to rely on rather than doing everything alone, but it’s so rushed that it doesn’t earn its ending where they bring back the closing song from the first film in an attempt to get you to feel something (and for a beat it works because that’s the only memorable song in this entire film that tugs at your heartstrings and it’s…not an original song from this film).

I could go on and on (I barely even mentioned the songs which included clumsy lyrics like the chorus of “Can I Get a Chee Hoo” rhyming Moana’s name with the repeated refrain “Come on-a, Moana”), but the reason I’m saying any of this is because that first film meant a lot to me, my wife, and my son. So for anyone to say our collective disappointment is “fake” is so frustratingly dismissive. It is possible to have a healthy discourse when we’re not entering a conversation in bad faith.

 

Very heartwarming

 

No surprises here for those who seen the mid credit scene but at least the positive thing Moana 3 is from the outset they can develop it as a film this time around.