***SPOILERS***

Please continue pre-release discussion here

Movie: Moana 2 (Starring: Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Hualalai Chung, Rose Matafeo, David Fane, Awhimai Fraser, Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda)

Release Date:
November 27, 2024

Rating:
PG

Runtime
1h 40 min

Budget
$150 million (estimated)

Box Office
$225 million opening 5 day Thanksgiving weekend (domestic)
$163.8 million opening (international)
$389 million opening (global)

#1 Thanksgiving debut weekend box office record
#1 Thanksgiving day
#1 Black Friday
#1 5 day debut weekend

Synopsis

After receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors, Moana must journey to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters for an adventure unlike anything she's ever faced.

IMDB
IMDB 7.1, 18,554 votes as of 12/3/24

Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes 64% Critics, 87% Audience as of 12/3/24

Metacritic
Metacritic Score 58 as of 12/3/24

Trailer:

Poster

I went ahead and made a Moana 2 review thread since I didn't see one. Seems animated movies don't get quite as much love around here. Plus this will be one of the biggest movies of the year so seems significant enough to talk about. Huge opening for this movie. I'm sure Disney is really happy with themselves.

Let me preface this by saying I'm a pretty huge Disneyphile. Their movies and parks have been a big part of my childhood and life in general. I really do love a lot of Disney movies including the first Moana. It's one of my favorite Disney movies. I absolutely loved the cultural aspects, the overall message of finding oneself and their place as a community leader, inspiration for young girls, and of course the banger tunes. I really had misgivings about Moana 2. I've had a lot of misgivings about the Disney corporation as a whole. They've been rapidly transitioning from a story driven company to one of profit. I'm starting to see some of the hints of the dreaded days of the direct to video sequel Eisner era. There's so much cost cutting going on in the parks and just a lack of overall imagination. They've just been giving fans what they think they want instead of creating something entirely new. More IP, more sequels. Tearing down old beloved parts of the park to chase the latest IP that marketing says is a big hit with customers. I was very fearful that this is the Disney that created Moana 2. Especially when Iger announced it's opening date of this year. It's crazy to think he just announced Moana 2 THIS year. And when he did he didn't announce the original voice actors. That announcement wouldn't come until much later. Then there's the news that Lin-Manuel Miranda wouldn't be involved and it has "direct to video" vibes all over it. This feels like a corporate call to arms to create Moana 2. This is in stark contrast with Frozen 2 which felt like it came from much more of a place of creativity and had the time to gestate into the movie that it became.

Well, my fears were pretty much fulfilled. While it's no where near as bad as say, The Little Mermaid II of Hunchback II it's not great. It's serviceable at least to the point where it doesn't poop all over the original. But speaking of original this movie doesn't have an original though in the entire runtime. Absolutely nothing in this movie that I loved came from this movie. It was all from the original Moana. Moana, Maui, Pua, hei-hei, even the jokes, the musical cues, everything came from the original movie. They even recycled the same exact jokes. One glaring example is Maui's transformations. He's an awesome character that can turn into anything he wants yet they didn't show him change into anything new. Absolutely nothing new. Every single transformation was from Moana 2. Even the shark head joke they just reused. The new characters were completely expendable and ridiculous with zero character development. The engineering girl who didn't really engineer anything. Just wanted to destroy everything. The idea for the farmer was pretty cool but that didn't pan out into a single thing. Only an old guy to be the butt of jokes. The fan boy was probably the best but got old quick. It reminded me of the similarly mediocre Lightyear and his crew of total one-note characters.

And for all of the talk about this big giant journey unfortunately most of that journey was shown on screen. Most of the time the real heroes journey happens within themselves. In other words character development. Of which this movie has zero character development. The characters are exactly the same from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie. Ok yeah sure Moana now has tattoos. But what does that even mean? How was that earned. I saw nothing that showed that she grew to earn her new status. Is she a demi-god now?? They didn't even explain that. She's just glittery now. Maui didn't change at all. Like literally, as I mentioned before with his transformations. Compare this with Frozen 2 which is a similar Disney sequel from a super popular original movie. This movie did such a better job with character development than Moana 2. There isn't a villain in Frozen 2 so most of the conflict is internal which leads to some great character development. Each one of them go through a transition and have to deal with their own conflict so that they come out changed at the end. That's a major theme of the whole movie. Contrast this with Moana 2 where all the conflict is external so it really just becomes about the plot. Which is really boring BTW.

The music is absolutely forgettable. Seems like they just had a checkbox for the songs. "Okay we need a Moana inspirational song, a Maui song, a cultural song and a bad guy song". I mean I know every Disney movie is like that. But it's especially important when you're doing a sequel that you don't repeat yourself. Look at how awesome the original songs in Moana were.

Also WTF was up with that ending? Is Moana now the MCU? WTF would they end the movie on a stupid cliffhanger? Ugh...again it just feels like a total cash grab. I mean the plot was boring and largely pointless anyways. The big climax is Maui fights with tornadoes which doesn't even make any sense and Moana dives down to touch dirt. And the whole bat lady. Oh she's terrible, hates humans, oh wait she's nice now? WTF??? What is up with Disney trying to make every villain good and misunderstood now? It works fine as a spin off series on a long standing villain that's been around for decades. Not so much for a brand new villain you just introduced 5 minutes ago.

It wasn't all bad though. The animation was fine, although not as good as Moana which is really weird to me. I did like the cocomora teaming up with them. I'm very glad the cultural aspect was still there and intact and they brought back those musicians responsible for the music in the first one. I did like the message of connectivity but again instead of focusing on that they just drop it right when it get's interesting.

Both my girls 12 and 5 liked it. It did great in the box office so it seems like the audience likes it well enough. But for those of us looking for some high quality Disney entertainment that really goes beyond just another kids movie won't find it here.

Oops. Can a mod please move this to Movie Talk?

Damn I checked and double checked so everything would be great and I wouldn't have to edit anything. But had multiple tabs of the forum up to copy previous thread elements in and didn't notice I was in Other when I hit post new thread.

As I posted in the announcement thread, I thought this was good, not great. Definitely not as memorable as the 1st one. It's still beautifully animated and all the voice actors are good, including Johnson. However, I felt like the story was lacking something. It felt like this was developed as a streaming movie initially, which apparently it was. The songs were definitely forgettable. It was sorely missing Linn Manuel Miranda.

I didn't hate it, but it was a disappointing follow up to one of their classics. It gets a B- from me, more for the technical standpoint. I will say that I thought Moana's sister was adorable.

Took the kids to see this today. It's not good. In a year with no Rebel Moon installment, this might have been the worst thing I saw. It's like take everything you remember about the first Moana and make it 50% worse. At least. The kids liked it because kids are dumb, but even then I could tell it didn't really hit. I don't expect it to get much play in the rotation once it's added to D+.

The biggest disappointment was the "boat snack upgrade" joke from the trailer (that has been quoted in my house consistently for months) was cut out of the movie. There's a version of the joke in the final cut, but it's not the same.

Saw it with my wife last night. Nowhere near as good as the first one. The plot felt paper thin and the music didn’t stand out at all. The biggest thing I can say is it looked good.

It really feels like this could have gone straight to Disney+ as it’s in the same vein as the Disney direct to video sequels of the 90s/00s. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original movie either necessarily but it’s a far, far better film than this sequel.

March 12 on Disney+