Moana Review: This Flat, Lifeless, Artificial Rehash Is Unwelcome
by Witney Seibold · /FilmI am fighting for something to say about Thomas Kail's 2026 live-action remake of "Moana," but I am drawing a blank. It was such an insubstantial experience. So perfunctory. So ... blah. I wonder what function it serves. Well, other than a cynical attempt to hate-milk the last, semi-viscous drops of nostalgia fluid from an audience whose nostalgia glands have long since run dry. Banking on our warm fuzzies for your old projects will only last as long as you have old projects to exploit. Disney began eating its own tail with its wave of live-action remakes — a trend that began properly in 2010 with the release of Tim Burton's shockingly successful "Alice in Wonderland" — but "Moana" indicates that the company has run out of tail to eat.
The original animated "Moana" came out in 2016, the same year that Disney released their remake of "The Jungle Book" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass," the sequel to their 2010 remake of "Alice in Wonderland." That makes "Moana" the first live-action Disney remake to remake an animation that was released after Disney remakes were already a thing. This oblique record may be the only thing that makes "Moana" distinct.
I have to spend a few paragraphs placing "Moana" in the context of larger trends, because there is so little to address about the movie itself. It's fodder. Content. Colorful, and somehow drab. Full of incident, and somehow inert. Full of familiar, beloved songs that, in live-action, are obfuscated by visual and aural noise. Despite being a story of ancient people righting the previously imbalanced balance of nature, it looks flat and artificial.
Artistically and visually speaking, the closest analogue I can conjure is George Lucas' "Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones." That's not a compliment.
Moana is bland, artificial, and forgettable
It's a bit silly to recap the plot of "Moana," as the original came out in 2016, and its sequel in 2024. It hasn't been gone long enough for us to become nostalgic. Indeed, one has, in the last decade, been able to book a Disney cruise to the company's Hawaiian resort Aulani, which exploits a lot of imagery and elements from "Moana." How can we be wistful about something if you keep selling it to us?
But to the point: an element of "Moana" is that the title character can commune, psychically, with the sea. When she falls into the water, a living, intelligent water tentacle can lift her out of the drink and deposit her back on the deck of her ship. One might suspect the undersea aliens from James Cameron's "The Abyss" might be involved. Moana (Catherine Laga'aia) is thrown in the ocean repeatedly, only to be rescued by the living waves. Oddly, however, she doesn't seem to get wet. Watching the scenes of Moana being thrown in the water, only to emerge with somewhat damp hair and unsmudged lip gloss, made me wonder if there was ever a scene that the filmmakers shot next to a real ocean.
At least when the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) is fished out of the sea, he looks like he was actually dipped in water. I can't say the same for Johnson's physique, which, thanks to a series of cartoonish tattoos (and weird lack of nipples), also looks artificial. Johnson is a large, buff man who clearly works very hard to maintain a specific musculature. It would be nice if we could see some of those muscles ripple in a fleshy, human way, rather than wonder if the actor is wearing a rubber suit.
So little is live-action in this live-action movie
Although "Moana" was meant to breathe new life in the not-old material with new live-action scenes, it's frustrating how little of the movie is actually live-action. Some of the early scenes of Moana among her people were clearly filmed on sets, and actors like Rena Owen (as Moana's kindly, pseudo-kooky grandmother) and John Tui (as Moana's doting dad) are flesh-and-blood people who can ostensibly interact. But they are thrown into a story that involves a CGI ocean with CGI water tentacles, a demigod that transforms into CGI animals, a CGI chicken, a giant singing CGI crab (voiced by Jemaine Clement, just like in the original), CGI coconut imps on a CGI ship, and a climax wherein Maui fights with a CGI lava monster and makes peace with a CGI nature goddess. Oh yes, and Maui's tattoos are little living frescoes that just add to the animated busyness of the film at large. When Maui sings his hit song "You're Welcome," the screen bursts with flying colorful animated undersea creatures straight out of "Yellow Submarine."
The Motion Picture Academy demands that an animated feature must be no more than 25% live-action. By that gauge, the so-called live-action "Moana" also counts as an animated movie.
But then, one of the functions of these live-action remakes, notably the ones that lean very heavily into VFX, is to blur the line between media. Jon Favreau, the director of the 2019 remake of "The Lion King," noted that his movie shouldn't be considered animated, even though it is nearly 100% animated. The purpose of this line-blurring of media is unclear to me, although I recall hearing rumors that it might have had something to do with what Disney pays animators vs. what they pay VFX technicians.
What's the point of Moana (2026)?
The live-action dialogue scenes between Moana and Maui are of a blandly efficient variety. For all the CG, the camerawork is thuddingly uninspired, with the two lead actors flinging their lines in straightforward shot-reverse-shot scenes. This is why I compare the movie to "Attack of the Clones." In both films, live actors are filmed with flat angles, and deliver their dialogue dispassionately. Also in both films, the dull talking is interrupted by jarringly unmatched animated scenes that are only impressive from a technical standpoint.
The shot-reverse-shot closeups of the dialogue scenes make one suspect that Dwayne Johnson and Catherine Laga'aia weren't in the same room. If they were, the two actors have no chemistry or comedic timing together. Laga'aia is dazzling, and has a good career ahead of her, but she seems to have been directed to give Moana no personality quirks. Or perhaps she was asked not to upstage Johnson, who serves as a producer on the movie. I vaguely suspect that Johnson wanted this film made merely so he could put on the Maui wig and sing "You're Welcome" in live-action, dispelling any potential suspicions that someone else sang for him in 2016. Not that anyone suspected, but the "Moana" remake does bear the distant whiff of an ego defense.
Is that why we're here? The function of Disney's live-action remakes, as far as I can tell, has been to address lingering criticisms — usually of internet vintage — that modern audiences have of the originals. Their "Beauty and the Beast" remake addressed online accusations of Belle's Stockholm Syndrome, for instance. Their "Aladdin" remake addressed the mostly all-white casting of Persian characters. The "Lion King" remake, set in Africa, finally cast mostly Black actors.
No film is an island
Additionally: the "Cinderella" remake gave the princess and the prince a little time to bond before their nuptials, a common nitpick about Disney Princess movies. Their "Snow White" seems to have been made (partly, anyway) to point out that the Seven Dwarfs were actually magical fantasy creatures, and not humans with dwarfism. The only strikingly original message to come from a live-action Disney remake was from, of all things, Tim Burton's "Dumbo," which managed to be a deliberate anti-Disney, anti-corporate-entertainment screed.
The "Moana" remake, however, has nothing it wants to address. It's the exact type of automated corporate entertainment that "Dumbo" was criticizing. It cannot address any kind of mass, intergenerational relitigation, because it's of the same vintage as its forebear. The original film hasn't been in the mass consciousness for decades. If the Disney remakes exist as counterpoints in a larger conversation, "Moana 2026" is still part of the original conversation.
The movie, then, brings back a few of the original film's cast members, and tells an identical story, beat for beat, without any flourishes, surprises, or interesting new angles. It's like a cover song, but with worse instrumentation and a different lead singer. Although, to be fair, the singing in the new "Moana" is perfectly fine. But I can't imagine anyone buying this film's soundtrack instead of the original. Or, heck, even watching this film instead of the original.
"Moana" will likely be a big hit, but if it flops, it may mark the end of another 2010s trend that has finally, rightfully died. Perhaps these remakes will finally, finally peter out. We can only hope.
/Film Rating: 4 out of 10
"Moana" opens in theaters on July 10, 2026.