MOANA 2 landed in cinemas last week, eight years after the release of the original.
Right off the bat this movie had high expectations to live up to.
With the success of the original 2016 movie, audiences had high hopes for Moana 2.
On its opening weekend Moana 2 made US$600 million at the global box office as it outperformed its competitors, Wicked and Gladiator II.
I had high hopes for the movie, only to be let down.
With the return of Moana herself (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) and Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) the movie started out promising.
The addition of Moana’s younger sister, Simea, village elder Kele, Maui fanboy Moni and engineer Loto provided some excitement going into the movie.
However, due to the lack of character development these new characters failed to add anything.
Rather than add to the plot and become deeply involved, these new characters became sidekicks to Moana as she journeyed across the ocean.
Unfortunately, sidekicks are something this movie did not need.
If anything, the addition of these characters hindered the development of this movie as all they did was provide some funny but truly cringe worthy moments.
Another area where this movie failed to impress was the lack of musical elements.
During the original 2016 movie, Moana and Maui found themselves singing their hearts out and providing songs that still reminisce with us today.
The lack of songs during Moana 2 definitely led to some disappointment.
Don’t get me wrong though, there were some nice songs in this movie, but none were memorable.
I could not tell you about a single song from Moana 2, simply because they weren’t catchy.
Compare this to when the first movie came out, we all found ourselves singing You’re Welcome or humming to How far I’ll go.
As the movie goes on, I thought to myself repeatedly, did I miss something?
There were plot holes everywhere.
With little to no explanation as to what was happening and why, it felt like a whole season of a TV show was strung together to make a movie.
Not to mention the lack of Maui!
As one of the main characters who played a significant role in the original movie, Maui was absent for a majority of Moana 2.
While it was great that the movie focused more on Moana and her new crew mates, the fan favourite Maui lacked screen time, which was a huge disappointment.
This was completely unnecessary and unfortunately the lack of Maui really ruined the movie for me.
Despite the various disappointments throughout the movie, I was pleasantly surprised with the ending.
I have got to give it to Disney here, they did an excellent job when it came to portraying numerous islander nations and their beliefs.
They represented the Polynesian culture in both a respectful and educational way that was undoubtedly admirable.
While Moana 2 was not at all a bad movie and was better than many other animated Disney movies I have seen, it did pale in comparison to its predecessor.
