Moana

“Moana” never makes live action more captivating than animation. On some level these movies will always be unnecessary. The remake of “Moana” can’t, and shouldn’t, replace the original. But it earns a place alongside it.

Johnson understands Maui, so his performance is good once you get past the initial shock of his unusual appearance. He has great chemistry with Laga’aia. But the best performance in “Moana” comes from Rena Owen as Moana’s grandmother Gramma Tala.

There’s a case to suggest that this new Moana may be the best Disney live-action remake, in no small part because it’s so loyal to the beloved source material. Yet in being so it proves its own redundancy. Everything good about it, from the jokes to the visual design, was already done, almost exactly the same, by animators a decade ago.

The remake of Moana is just a shameless attempt to make the accountants at Disney happy by using nostalgia to get audiences to buy tickets. There’s only one problem with that ploy: there hasn’t even been enough time for the original, as excellent as it is, to calcify into a widely-recognized source of cultural longing for yesterday.

Unfortunately, Moana’s desperately unambitious approach is its undoing, it’s a tale of great courage told with creative cowardice, that’s so in thrall to the masterful, much too recent original it’s impossible to see it as anything other than a financially motivated facsimile.

You know a movie is adrift when you spend the running time admiring the grooming.

Nothing much of any value is added in this lifeless, halfhearted picture.

I thought this was beautifully done. Catherine Laga’aia is a star. I cried twice.

As somebody who never watched the original animated movie when it was released and still hasn't, this is ok. The Rock being Maui is probably the main problem, and it's mainly due to his age. I think he did a fine job with the role, to be honest. Besides that, I know why they chose him since he was the original Voice Actor, but I don't think it was the best choice for a live-action adaptation; however, the best parts are the visuals of some of the scenes they are really pretty to look at and fun to watch move on the screen

It was colorful and charming and had its moments, but honestly I was thinking what it the point? Was this a remake that had to be made? Especially right after Moana 2 was just out in the theaters a couple years ago? This seems like a cash grab to me. The kids will love it because it’s the same story as the animated film and that will allow them to enjoy it without any uncertainty. But it’s not worth seeing several times and will most likely be on Disney plus in weeks. If you want a couple of hours of distraction for your kids, go and see it.

BAD: A failed cash grab that at times is the equivalent of jingling keys to get a toddler's attention.

Oh my god, this has got to be the most boring and pointless out of all the Disney "live action" remakes yet. I wasn't expecting much anyway but somehow, much like The Lion King 2019, they've managed to make one of their best modern animated movies incredibly flat and boring. I really wanted to like Catherine L'agaia as Moana, but while she is a decent actor, she really can't sing very well at all - she at least can't live up to Au'li Cravalho. And since Dwayne Johnson's in this movie playing Maui again, why did they not just get her to play Moana? Talking of which, Dwayne looks absolutely ridiculous - he doesn't look like a demigod, he just looks exactly what he is... a man in his 50s with a bad wig and an utterly unconvincing muscle suit. The film itself is just a shot-for-shot carbon copy of the original, which might've worked if it was actually as "live action" as it claims to be. However it's still at least 80% CGI, including where it doesn't need to be (much like the Snow White remake) which means the scenes supposedly filmed at sea look flat, lifeless and fake. Technically this shouldn't be the worst Disney live action remake, because Moana is still a fantastic story. But I have to rate it as the worst because it somehow makes a great story an utter chore to watch, just because it adds absolutely nothing to the original and doesn't even try. Snow White is genuinely terrible but it's so aggressively incompetent that it manages to be more watchable than this. Moana 2026 is just aggressively boring instead.