Going to the movies is basically never a bad experience for me. If I go alone, it’s a chance to decompress, drink the La Croix I snuck in, and learn a little more about filmmaking. If I go with other people, it’s a chance to hang out, eat the popcorn they bought, and enjoy the shared adventure that the theatrical experience provides. Moana 2 was the latter. I saw it with my wife, my sister, her husband, and my four nieces over Thanksgiving weekend, and had a great time. However, that doesn’t mean Moana 2 is great.
In fact, it’s clear every time a character begins to sing that we are watching the product of a team that is attempting to recapture the magic of a gigantic hit, but without the original team members that made it so special. In that way, it reminds me a little of BioShock 2.
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BioShock 2 And Moana 2 Said Goodbye To The Original Creators
That sequel, like Moana 2, was made by a different team than the original shooter. While Irrational moved on from BioShock to work on its sequel, BioShock Infinite — a process that would take the Ken Levine-led team six years — 2K Marin was tasked with creating a more iterative follow-up. The result was BioShock 2, which offered a new story, but in the same setting with the same assets.
Now, BioShock 2 is a better game than Moana 2 is a movie. It still plays great, it has some interesting ideas — like casting the player as a Big Daddy — and the team that made its DLC, Minerva’s Den, went on to develop one of my all-time favorite games, Gone Home. BioShock 2 is a good enough game.
But its return to Rapture means that it doesn’t feel new in any meaningful way. The environments feel similar and, since we know Rapture so well from the first game, it doesn’t have the capacity to surprise anymore. The story is less interesting because we’ve seen all the tricks this Randian dystopia has up its sleeves. It feels like 2K Marin is stuck killing time in a familiar space while Irrational works to cook up something new.
This isn’t to say Irrational’s 2013 sequel BioShock Infinite is good. That game has rocks in its head. But it represents what I want from a BioShock sequel more than 2. Not a return to the same, but the exploration of a new retrofuturist society that evokes the feeling of the original game, without repeating the specifics.
Moana 2’s Familiar Beats
Moana 2 is pretty similar. It mostly retreads the original’s beats. There’s an upbeat song that introduces us to Motonui (Where You Are in the original, We’re Back in Moana 2), an ’I want’ song about Moana’s quest to leave the island (How Far I’ll Go in the original, Beyond in Moana 2), a Lin-Manuel Miranda-style pop-rap song from Maui (You’re Welcome in Moana, Can I Get A Chee Hoo? in Moana 2), etc.
That last example highlights the issue that Moana 2 runs into, just like BioShock 2 before it. The team that made Moana so great is absent. Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t return to write the songs for the sequel, and his absence is noticeable. His brand of corniness may grate on people now that we’re long beyond the Obama-era optimism that Hamilton emerged from, but he’s an incredibly gifted modern showtune writer. I like some songs in Moana 2, but the new team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear just aren’t on the same level, at least not yet.
Directors John Musker and Ron Clements aren’t back either, as they’ve both retired from Walt Disney Animation Studios in the eight-year interim between movies. Those guys are legends, helming some of the biggest hits of Disney’s ’90s renaissance, like Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Hercules.
Plus, the underrated ’00s gems Treasure Planet and The Princess and the Frog.
The biggest issue, though, is that Moana 2 began life as a Disney+ series before being reworked into a feature film. The movie’s episodic structure makes it feel more like a condensed season of TV than a full-fledged movie. That isn’t the fault of any creative personnel — in the same way that 2K Marin getting tasked with making a quick follow-up to BioShock while Irrational worked on the real sequel — but it adds to the feeling that this is a lesser retread, more than a real sequel. Kids will still be enraptured, but I wish the creative team wasn’t stranded in Rapture.
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