Moana 2 is lost at sea
Navigating a vast and beautiful ocean empty of bigger ideas, this is a second-rate sequel from the songs to the story.
Photo: Disney
Ship breaking dismantles a decommissioned vessel so that its constituent parts can be repurposed, even reused. It’s a nasty business, but recycling is certainly better than scuttling something down to the briny depths. Moana (Auliʻi Cravalho) wasn’t originally supposed to set sail again on the big screen. Her further adventures were meant to fill the streaming rows of Disney+ as a series. But the powers that be decided (possibly because the Frozen sequel made $1.5 billion) that the show was to be reconfigured into a movie, and the intrepid daughter of her island’s chief—still technically not a princess—repositioned as its driving force. The resulting feature debut of directing team David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller is a ramshackle Franken-ship still seaworthy enough to navigate its theatrical release, but it’s got more in common with straight-to-video sequels than the clever original.
Three years have passed and Moana no longer needs to figure out who she is. She knows that she can be both the future leader of her people and an adventurer, and so does her community. Her island is now populated exclusively by Moana fans, falling over themselves to worship her and the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) with whom she wrote her way into legend. This is usually where Disney heroes kick up their heels and start happily-ever-aftering, but Moana is called once more, inelegantly, away from home.
After the clarity of one of Disney’s best “I Want” songs, the quest Moana is set upon feels forced and fake: After discovering a shard of pottery marked with the location of a mysterious island, Moana is confronted with proof that her people are not the only people. This and her new designation as a wayfinder means that she’s asked to find that island, Motufetu—which the god Nalo has cursed, for some reason, to no longer serve as a waypoint for disparate islander peoples—and reconnect all those separated by the waves.
Moana 2 tries splitting the difference between a couple different motivations for this, gesturing both at Moana’s general curiosity about the larger world and at some uncertain ill fate that will befall her (lush, thriving) island if it stays isolated. These are half-hearted ideas, embedded in Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear’s forgettable songs, ranging from truly terrible shipwrecks to embarrassing Lin-Manuel Miranda tribute band tracks. Losing Miranda is a terrible blow for the film, though his presence still haunts the dialogue. Every other line is about knowing the way, telling our stories, and how far we’ll go. It’s like how celebrities tend to repeat the same branding-appropriate phrases after the humanity has been coached out of them. It reinforces the sense that the sequel isn’t confident enough to strike out on its own.