Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Moana
The story hasn't changed. Moana (Catherine Laga'aia), the future chief of the island of Motunui, defies her father's warnings and sails past the reef with the disgraced demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) to return a stolen heart to the mother island Te Fiti and lift a curse strangling her people's home. It's a clean adventure structure, one that worked well in 2016's animated film. This version treats that structure as a formality to clear before the visual effects team takes over.
And the CGI takes over constantly. Heihei the rooster, Te Kā the lava demon, entire ocean sequences: all obviously generated, none of it earning the promise the film's marketing keeps making. If the plan was always to animate most of the movie, the question is why bother restaging it as live-action at all.
The human performances don't pick up the slack. Catherine Laga'aia has been billed as a discovery, and there are flickers of screen presence in her early scenes on Motunui, but once the voyage starts she and Dwayne Johnson both go flat, running through beats rather than feeling them. Rena Owen's Gramma Tala should be the emotional hinge of the whole film and instead reads like she wandered in from a different, warmer cut. This is a story that only works if you're concerned for a teenager alone on the open ocean, and none of the performances make you feel it.
The direction doesn't help. Scenes cut before they take a foot hold, edited with the nervous energy of a slideshow that doesn't trust any single image to hold attention. It's an odd choice for a story about slowing down long enough to listen to an ocean, a grandmother, an ancestor.
The songs don't help either. None of the new material locks into a hook, and the film seems to lose its nerve about being a musical partway through, cutting between numbers and straight dialogue like it isn't sure which movie it's making. A musical that keeps second-guessing whether it's a musical isn't going to convince anyone else either.
Even smaller logic gaps stop mattering to the filmmakers. Moana and Maui split half a banana at one point and that's the only meal either of them is shown eating across a multi-day open-ocean journey. It's a nothing detail on its own, but it's symptomatic: nobody making this movie seems especially interested in whether any of it holds together, because the CGI spectacle is doing all the work they think they need.
The costuming and production design are the one place the film actually delivers, and it's a shame that work is stuck inside a story that doesn't care about its own details. Everything else feels like a duplication of the 2016 animated film with a bigger budget and less nerve, a remake that can't decide whether it wants to exist as its own thing or just resell you the original with a straighter face.
"Moana" opens in theaters on Friday, July 10, 2026.
