Disney's live-action 'Moana' is a spectacularly pointless exercise

Almost a decade after the animated original charted a flawless course, Disney’s live-action 'Moana' has arrived in cinemas. The reviews are already grim, dragging a 35 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a miserable 45 on Metacritic, but the most damning criticism isn't that the film is actively terrible. It is that it is entirely pointless. The studio has mounted a vast, expensive production to achieve nothing more than a rigid, uninspired tracing of a masterpiece.

The mechanics of the recreation are all present and correct. Dwayne Johnson returns to flex and smirk as Maui, while newcomer Catherine Laga'aia steps capably into the title role. Original star Auli'i Cravalho even serves as an executive producer, popping up alongside Laga'aia for a new track, "Along the Way". Yet every frame feels heavier and duller than the 2016 animation. What was once vibrant, elastic, and bursting with kinetic visual invention has been flattened by the literalism of live-action filmmaking. The magic simply does not translate when tethered to real gravity.

Audiences, it seems, have finally noticed the trick. Tracking suggests a dismal opening weekend somewhere between $40 million and $60 million, following a lacklustre $4.5 million in previews. That is a sharp, sobering rejection for a franchise of this magnitude. Disney has spent years strip-mining its own animated vault, assuming that brand recognition alone could justify these three-dimensional photocopies. But 'Moana' proves that without a genuine artistic mandate—without a reason to exist beyond filling a quarterly release slate—even the most beloved story will inevitably sink.