Moana doesn’t have much inner journey left, but the movie has vibrant monsters and a flow of movement that keeps your eyeballs dancing.
At the end of “Moana,” which came out eight years ago, our plucky Polynesian heroine—who’s not a princess—had defeated the giant lava monster Te Kā and returned the heart of Te Fiti, the moss-green goddess of nature. An eager but untested island girl, Moana became a wayfinder, restoring her lush tropical home and discovering, along the way, that her people had always been voyagers. She also bonded with the bickering but insecure refrigerator-bodied hunk demigod Maui, helping to restore his power as well. (At heart, “Moona” was a buddy movie.) All in all, she accomplished quite a bit, which may leave you wondering: What’s left for Moana to do in the sequel?
That’s a silly question, of course, since the premise of a movie like “Moana 2” is that a team of screenwriters is going to put their heads together and come up with a whole lot of seismic new saving-the-world hoops for Moana to jump through. The movie has barely even begun when it hits us with a cataclysm. Moana, voiced once again with pearly precosity by Auli’i Cravalho, is yearning to seek out people from other islands, but she discovers that isn’t possible. The nasty god Nalo has placed a curse on Motufetu, the island that once connected everyone. How does an island connect everyone? Oh, never mind.) Moana must now journey to the distant seas of Oceania to remove that curse by fighting Nalo.
I wouldn’t quite put this in the category of “same s—t, different day,” but the story is engineered to strike very familiar beats. (It’s also what Stephen K. Bannon, for one, would call a parable of globalization.) The difference is that Moana has already grown up into a heroine who found her faith, believes in herself, and all that other good stuff. She doesn’t have much inner journey left. So “Moana 2,” far more than the first film, becomes a non-interior animated action fairy tale.
In “Moana,” I always felt like the sequence where Moana, Maui, and their animal sidekicks (the cuddly pig Pua, the demented rooster Heihei) fight off the Kakamora, those coconut pirates who look like souvenirs in a Tahiti novelty shop, slowed the movie down. In “Moana 2,” Moana travels on her handsome flat canoe with a crew of one-note human sidekicks—the punky brat Loto (Rose Matefeo), the curmudgeon farmer Kele (David Fane), and the moony-eyed dude Moni (Hualalai Chung), who idolizes Maui to the point of having a crush on him—when she runs, once more, into the Kakamora. But the sequence that follows is actually the most rousing in the movie so far. They team up with that coconut brigade to defeat a clam so massive that it’s literally a mountain split in half. That’s a cool image to gawk at, and there are other ticklish creatures in “Moana 2,” like a towering sea monster or this movie’s equivalent of the lava demon—the god Nalo, a purple light force embedded in ocean tornadoes that emit such a potent charge they knock the tattoos right off of Maui.
“Moana 2” has three directors, David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, and Dana Ledoux Miller, none of whom has made a feature before. They stage the film with a standard impressive technical flair, a flow of movement that keeps your eyeballs dancing. That said, this is also a musical, one that Lin-Manuel Miranda, having launched a new branch of his career as a Disney tunesmith with “Moana,” elected not to come back for. I can understand why: His “Moana” songs were memorable (especially “How Far I’ll Go” and “You’re Welcome”), and he only upped his game with “Encanto,” an even more intricately inspired entertainment. But Miranda, I’m guessing, figured that he’d already told the story of Moana through song and didn’t need to rehash it.
The songs in “Moana 2,” by Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, are perky and appealing, with that electrified island drum bounce, but most of them sound like the imitation-Lin-Manual knockoffs they are. The early getting-wistful-about-the-ocean number, “Beyond,” is fine in a generic way, but it’s no “How Far I’ll Go.” “What Could Be Better Than This?” features faux-Lin rap, and “Get Lost” has a catchy hook. But none of the songs summon that indelible quality that sealed the story of “Moana” into our hearts. Maui still looks and talks like Jack Black on protein supplements, and Dwayne Johnson’s performance, once again, is sheer blinkered aggro charm. The character of Matangi is introduced, a sharp-tongued goddess who Awhimai Fraser voices like the reincarnation of Downtown Julie Brown, but she’s given too little to do. There is also a lot of colorful slime.
“Moana 2” is an okay movie, an above-average kiddie roller-coaster, and a piece of pure product in a way that the first “Moana,” at its best, transcended. The new movie wears you down to win you over; it’s a just efficient enough delivery system for follow-your-dreams inspiration to be a major holiday hit. When Maui, in one of the funnier lines, says to Moana that though she isn’t a princess, “A lot of people think you are,” that’s the film, in a good-natured way, having its rebel-heroine cake and eating it too. By this point, Moana seems ready to level up to island queen, and I have a feeling that she’ll get the chance. Can another tropical cataclysm, test of indie-spirit moxie, and benign spasm of Maui troublemaking be far behind?
