Not to sound too much like an old man but back in my day sequels to Disney’s animated movies usually came in the form of direct-to-VHS/DVD movies, television series, or both. These days though, Disney is trying their hand at big budget theatrical sequels like Frozen II and Moana 2. While it’s true that Moana 2 started life being developed as a television series on Disney+, somewhere along the line Disney decided to scrabble together what they had from the show’s production and turn it into a full-blown movie. Unfortunately Moana 2 suffered from this approach, and you can spot that this movie is a mish-mash of television show ideas from a mile away.
Moana 2 once again stars the titular sea-faring heroine voiced by the excellently talented Auli’i Cravalho, now in search of other islands in order to connect her home island with all of the people of the ocean. She learns of a curse that is dividing the sea and sets out to stop it. She has a crew this time around, Moni (Hualalai Chung), a Maui-obsessed historian; Loto (Rose Matafeo), an inventor and mechanic, and Kele (David Fane), a curmudgeonly old farmer.
Moana’s crew are sadly one-note and make little to no difference to Moana’s journey over the course of the movie – instead they’re ever-present in the background as three personified running gags that are rarely actually funny. Dwayne Johnson’s Maui is back for the sequel too, though you’d be hard-pressed to find him for most of the running time. Maui spends most of Moana 2 sidelined by what we’re led to believe is a menacing villain, but once our crew catches up with him he’s not making any big splashes either.
I won’t go as far as to say Moana 2 is devoid of story, but what little story there is nothing more than a light framework that the characters are propelled through simply because they have to in order to get to the end of the movie. There are cheap fake outs in abundance, from the multiple times Heihei crowing is mistaken for another island responding to Moana’s horn, to more than a few fake death scenes, to the on-screen “villain” of the film only being on screen for maybe five minutes and not actually being a villain at all.
The actual big-bad, the perpetrator of the ocean’s curse that Moana is aiming to break, isn’t anywhere to be seen until a mid-credits scene that’s half sequel-tease/half gag cameo. The plot of Moana 2 feels episodic and inconsequential even though we’re told the stakes are higher than in the first film, because none of these characters actually learn anything of importance.
The quality of Moana 2’s music, too, is more than a couple steps beneath the smash hit that was the first Moana’’s soundtrack. This is in large part due to the absence of Lin-Manuel Miranda this time around, with Moana 2’s songwriting being handled by Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, the duo responsible for developing the Unofficial Bridgerton Musical on TikTok. Barlow and Bear’s writing repeatedly tries and fails to emulate Miranda’s signature style of rap-singing, resulting in forgettable songs with awkward timing at best and downright bad songs at worst. The film tries to remind audiences how good the first film was with repeated references to the first film’s soundtrack, but even those callbacks couldn’t save this film’s overall forgettable numbers. It’s probably not a good sign that in the days following my screening of Moana 2 I had songs from the first film stuck in my head while I struggled to remember any of the sequel’s.
A theatrical release of Moana 2 ultimately feels unnecessary. Squishing a television series sequel into a sub-two-hour movie didn’t leave any time for the story to develop, and trying to emulate Lin-Manuel Miranda’s excellent soundtrack left a bunch of the sequel’s songs high and dry. At best Moana 2 feels like a rushed prologue for the eventual Moana 3, though that’ll probably have to wait until after Disney releases the live-action remake of Moana.
Score: 5/10
Moana 2
Directed by: David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, & Dana Ledoux Miller
Written by: Jared Bush, Dana Ledoux Miller, Bek Smith
Starring: Auli’i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Hualalai Chung, and more.
Release Date: November 27, 2024
Rating: PG
Running Time: 1 hours 40 minutes
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.
Official Website: Link
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