The Most Important Story in America Today is Why Moana 2 Kinda Sucks

Well only by comparison, it's better than a bunch of other crap

It's a very old dad thing to critique children's media, but as it is the primary amount I consume these days I would ask you grant grace to a moviegoer who used to stand in line each Friday to see the latest releases -- indie, big budget, rom com and high drama alike -- and now goes only to movies where the previews include nothing but incomprehensible cash-grabs to sell tchotchkes made by slave laborers in China.

Hence, I have opinions about Moana 2.

The Disney release has been a massive financial success and broken box office records at ludicrous speed, despite only achieving middling critical and audience reviews -- describing it as visually impressive but scattered, underwritten, lacking the charm of the original, and so on. All of this is fair. But there's a deeper problem, which actually reveals a weakness that plagues the era of streaming content. Moana 2 wasn't supposed to be a movie -- it was supposed to be a Disney+ series, and a big part of the near-decade long delay since the release of the original was the hiccups with transitioning the storyline into a film that still seems long. The four year old daughter lost interest midway through the second act and started scribbling on the paper slips of the Alamo theater instead, only cluing back in the final ten minutes of the climax. Yet when we came back home and she asked to watch the first movie after dinner, she was focused with rapt attention. It's not just song quality that does that.

So what's the difference? Well, Moana 2 as a television streamer makes total sense. There are far too many new characters introduced, all of them underwritten. The pig is there, and the chicken (voice: Alan Tudyk) screams. There is a bat woman who is bat themed for reasons that make no particular sense and is nowhere near as hilarious as Jemaine Clement as a glam rock crab. (The O.G. Bowie version is here.) (Which is itself a reference to this from Flight of the Conchords.) There is more development in Moana 2 to a wordless coconut creature than some of the humans. Everyone does their thing in callback mode. Multiple reviewers have described the movie's plot as feeling like a throwback to direct-to-television sequels of Disney's classics (shout out to The Return of Jafar), though only this insightful Variety reviewer accurately describes it as “what Stephen K. Bannon, for one, would call a parable of globalization.” It is a mess.

But it's the sort of mess that would make sense as a streaming series! Clearly there is meant to be a "connection with other islands" storyline that hearkens back to sea quests time memorial -- an Odyssey of discovery that would throw Moana and crew into different situations and gain new friends and compatriots along the way. Instead it's all crammed into a package that requires more exposition and songs with lazy lyrics and chord changes too difficult for kids to master (the nearly two year old knows all the words to How Far I'll Go, there's no way she's going to sing any of these). For a big Disney movie, it feels kind of... cheap? Even The Rock is mailing it in, perhaps too focused on the live action version of the original -- which I expect to rake in even more cash.

What's noticeably absent as an adult viewer of all of this -- and of Bluey, Peppa Pig, I Am Groot, Isle of Dogs, Lego Batman and Frozen on repeat interminably -- is the absence of what makes the original Moana so appealing: the traditional arc of the Hero's Quest. Unlike the princess movies of note (the nod to which is the best line of the sequel) with their ludicrously exceptional characters, the first Moana adventure is marked by repeated failure, both by the protagonist and even her charisma-maxed demigod pal. Your heroine can't sail. She doubts her mission. She asks what's wrong with herself. She's deserted by the hero she sought, whose own emblem fails him. She refuses the quest, not just at the beginning but repeatedly, even an hour and twenty minutes into the movie. But because she fails, she learns. She determines she will take on the antagonist even without the help of a demigod, with the same spin move she saw him perform after her sailing failure. This is an unchosen one heroine who confronts unknown gods, monsters, and magic, and grows and changes -- not the normal stuff of Disney's fables!

The sequel has none of these things. From the first moment, she is the chosen one. Everything comes easy, every bet works, every joke is member berries, failure lasts seconds at most and there is always magic to save you. The attempt at a repeat of her nightmare moment (should you fail, this will happen) in the first film pales in comparison. An attempt to inject some degree of stakes at the very end of the story barely worried the kids in the theater -- they know everyone will be fine. There is no moment like the crowning moment of awesome that is Maui, powerless, hook broken, defying a lava god bellowing a Haka in fearless anticipation of his death. No one worries, so no one cares. Not even the kids.

But remember: buy a hook! Buy an oar! Preorder tickets for Mufasa today. Who cares if it makes sense, it just makes your brats shut up for two hours. And that’s what makes bank.

Anyway now I guess I have to talk about Hunter Biden…