There is something audacious about remaking a film that is barely ten years old. Not reinterpreting it, not reimagining it, just remaking it, beat for beat, song for song, line for line. Disney’s live-action Moana is exactly that. If you watched the 2016 original even once, you will spend the entirety of this film one step ahead of it. Every emotional turn, every comic beat, every lyric lands exactly where you already know it will. The screenplay, the story structure, the character arcs are all preserved in amber like that prehistoric mosquito on Richard Attenborough’s staff in Jurassic Park (1997). For returning audiences, Moana is not a film, so much as an expensive throwback.
And yet, for a child walking into this story for the very first time, it genuinely delivers. The songs, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s crown jewels from the original, remain among the finest written for a Disney film in the last decade. How Far I’ll Go, Shiny, You’re Welcome, haven’t aged a day and director Thomas Kail is wise enough to know you don’t tamper with perfection. If only the producers were just as prescient. Nevertheless, the songs carry the film and newcomer Catherine Laga’aia, who makes a radiant screen debut as Moana, gives the musical her whole heart.
Where the film earns its keep is in the technical showcase. The CGI work on the ocean, Te KÄ�, Tamatoa and Maui’s living tattoos is genuinely stunning. Cinematographer Oscar Faura keeps the Polynesian palette lush and sun-warmed. The production does its best to recreate the visual poetry of the original, and occasionally it gets there, too.
Then there’s Dwayne Johnson. As the voice of Maui in 2016, Johnson was a natural. His big personality translated perfectly into that muscle-mountain of an animated demigod, swagger and all. In the flesh, something gets lost in translation. The prosthetic muscles bulk him up to near-cartoon proportions, but the wig, stiff (no pun intended for The Rock) and Fabio-adjacent, never convinces. His dancing, though enthusiastic, sits in an uncomfortable middle ground between committed and self-conscious. You’re Welcome remains a visual spectacle precisely because Kail leans into 2D animated murals to carry the sequence, the moment Johnson is left to do it all himself, the cracks show (again, no pun intended). He’s not bad, but the role was built for animation, and you feel the mismatch.
Performances by Catherine Laga’aia, John Tui and Rena Owen cannot be faulted. They put their best into the characters, but the nuances of their characters were originally designed for the world of animation. In live action, the ‘animation’ idiosyncrasy doesn’t quite fit in.
Moana 2026 is a technically polished, musically blessed, dramatically inert retelling of a story that didn’t need retelling. For the children in the front rows experiencing it for the first time, it will be magic. For everyone else, it’s a very expensive cover version of a musical that’s barely forgotten. Perhaps, for once, a remix would have been a better creative choice.
By
