'Moana' (2026): Stranded on a Soundstage of Pure Nostalgia

I've always tried to give live-action remakes the benefit of the doubt. Call it cinephilic optimism, or maybe just stubbornness, but I tend to walk into these movies believing most of them can, at the very least, be competent, enjoyable companions to the animated films we grew up loving. Never replacements, just different flavors of the same story. The real tightrope walk for any of these projects is always the same one: change too much and you alienate the people who fell in love with the original; change too little and you're left wondering why the remake needed to exist in the first place. Moana finds itself stuck on the wrong side of that tightrope, and not because it dared to change anything. It didn't.

That's the fundamental problem here. This is, beat for beat, the same movie Ron Clements and John Musker gave us back in 2016, just filtered through a live-action lens that strips away most of what made the original feel alive. Where that Moana radiated color and motion, this one spends most of its runtime trapped inside visibly artificial studio spaces, the green screen never quite disappearing behind the effects layered over it. Even The Lion King (2019), a remake with a similar creative timidity, found small pockets of room to add texture to its characters. Here, Thomas Kail (Hamilton) never risks a single new wrinkle in the emotional architecture, leaving the film with nothing to stand on but its own shadow.

None of this is a knock on the cast trying to bring it to life. Catherine Laga'aia, making her feature film debut in the title role, carries herself with real warmth and conviction, and there's a genuine sweetness to her scenes alongside Dwayne Johnson (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) that occasionally recaptures a flicker of what made this character pairing work the first time around. But sweetness only goes so far when both performances feel slightly undercooked in different ways: Laga'aia sometimes straining for an intensity the screenplay never fully earns, Johnson coasting on charisma rather than digging into Maui's more wounded, redemptive layers. And I won't pretend that awful wig didn't pull me out of more than one scene.

The musical numbers, which should have been this remake's easiest win, end up being one of its clearest disappointments. The choreography reads as stiff, almost mechanically assembled, missing the loose, natural physicality that made the animated versions feel like they were bursting out of the characters rather than staged around them. The pacing suffers for it too. The second act drags in a way the original never allowed itself to, stretching beats that used to breeze by with real momentum. The new original song over the end credits is pleasant enough, but it's exactly that: an end credits song, arriving far too late to justify anything that came before it.

In the end, Moana isn't a bad movie so much as an unnecessary one, competently assembled but hollowed out by its own refusal to bring anything new to a story that already told itself perfectly the first time. Some voyages are only worth retaking if you're brave enough to chart a new course; this one simply retraces old waters and calls it discovery.

Rating: C