Moana 2 was pretty good all the way around. I saw it in theaters here in Muscatine. Here is my review of the film.
Pro’s:
Moana’s little sister was the perfect addition to this movie.
Moana having a younger sister made the film so much more sweet to me. When the little sister was running up to Moana yelling, “Big sis!” and Moana saying, “Little sis!” the entire theater collectively said “AWE.”
Moana not having a love interest and being the protector still makes me so happy.
Personally, I think that Disney princesses having husbands or boyfriends in every single movie is ridiculous. I think of Maui and Moana as brother and sister and do not think they should get together. I believe there is a power moment for Moana with her not having a guy, and her becoming a demigod and becoming better than Maui is the best thing ever and I’m excited for her to get tattoos.
The celebration of Polynesian culture is also great. Most of the cultures that are shown throughout the Disney films are based around white characters, and there is not a lot of representation of people of color who are displayed throughout Disney films. I think Moana’s representation of Polynesian culture is a great stepping stone for Disney.
Moana becoming a Demi-God made perfect sense. Moana becoming a demigod Made my heart happy. How she protects her Island and wants to bring people together makes her incredible.
It’s also a great setup for the third movie.
Looking forward to the next movie, you just know that Moana is going to gain more tattoos and become a better character. I’m super excited to see how they design her tattoos and the different types of antagonists that they include.
Con’s:
In this recent version of the movie, there were a lot of new characters that needed further development. Along with that, the conflicts were introduced and done way too fast for it to genuinely affect the plot.
There were so many antagonists unveiled, however, the main antagonist isn’t shown until the end credits. Which, I thought that there would be more background information on the bat lady and the others, but it kind of was just jumbled together and different people were thrown in without them being developed completely.
The songs had a different vibe than the first movie. It wasn’t bad but it was different than what I was expecting. With that being said, I have no negative feelings towards the songs. They were different from the first movie but not entirely in a bad way.
There wasn’t a reason to be on the edge of your seats because they had help every time.
As soon as the characters get into a situation, some other character ends up helping them and gets them out of it right away, getting rid of tension in the scenes.
They could have developed her family’s relationship with Moana.
In the first movie, we see her have a fight with her dad. This led me to think there would also be a family conflict in this movie. I’m not mad that she didn’t fight with her parents, but I did think that the dad would go with Moana, possibly because he started becoming more interested in the wave finders at the end of the first movie. I also wish I had seen more of the relationship between Moana and her little sister.
There are a lot of prominent personalities that we don’t see enough.
The characters that went with Moana to figure out if there were more people all had huge personalities. All of the character’s personalities clash with each other, and you don’t see enough of each person. Each person could have a very good backstory and these characters would’ve done better in a show rather than a movie.
Overall, this is a good movie to watch and I would give it 4/5 stars.
