Live-Action Moana Opens Soft, Draws Cold Reviews

There is a shot in which Moana, now made of flesh and blood, stands on the deck of a wooden sailing canoe and looks out at the horizon with an expression that is not quite fear and not quite wonder, but something in between, as though she herself is not sure why she is out here again. That single glance, caught halfway between two moods, sums up the whole live-action Moana more precisely than any earnings chart: the film has arrived, audiences are watching, and yet the question that shadows almost every Disney remake already hangs over it, the question of why.

The live-action version of the 2016 animated hit comes from Walt Disney, with Catherine Laga’aia making her debut in the title role, while Dwayne Johnson returns as the demigod Maui, a character who owed much of his charm in the cartoon precisely to the fact that animation had freed him from the laws of gravity. The story is left untouched: a girl from a Pacific island sets out across the open ocean to restore a broken balance to the world, carried by songs we already know by heart.

The numbers, however, speak more plainly than any synopsis. Preview screenings earned about $4.5 million, opening-weekend estimates range from $60 to $65 million, and some analysts push expectations down toward $40 million. For a production estimated at around $250 million, none of those figures looks like smooth sailing, especially given that the animated sequel launched as a billion-dollar phenomenon just two years ago.

Why doesn’t live-action Moana sail like the animated one?

The answer, it seems to me, lies in what the drawing gave for free and what the camera must labor to earn. In the animated Moana the ocean was a character, a dancer, an accomplice; the wave curved at the will of the dramatic moment, and the island glowed in a palette that does not exist in nature. Transposed into a photographic register, that same scenery must suddenly be convincing rather than merely beautiful, and that is where the venture most often stumbles. Critics fault the washed-out, greyish frames and the sense that, once the heroine sails onto the open water, all feeling of physical space is lost, as if the boat were moving through something the film itself cannot make tangible.

That is not the fault of the actors but of the remake logic, laid bare here to the bone. When a film follows the original scene by scene, song by song, it strips away the only reason it should exist, which is a fresh interpretation. What remains is a faithful reproduction, tidy and expensive, but a reproduction nonetheless, one that keeps reminding the viewer of the version they liked more.

What survives from the original

Not everything, but not nothing either. Laga’aia brings a sincere, unpretentious energy to the lead, and in its best moments the film rests on her face, on her ability to play curiosity without turning it childish. Johnson’s Maui is still as entertaining as the script allows, and the familiar melodies do their work on an audience that came to hear them again, lit up on the big screen.

The trouble is that all of it plays out in the shadow of its own model, and that as you leave the theater you catch yourself thinking about the cartoon rather than the film you have just watched. In recent years Disney has turned its catalogue into a mine from which it extracts the same stories in new packaging, and each time the same question of worth returns, not only financial but artistic. Moana on her sailing canoe gazes at the horizon, but the film, it seems, does not know where it is heading.

Has a live-action version of a favorite cartoon ever been better than the original for you, or is a remake a lost battle from the start?