Moana 2: Movie Review

TLDR: Watch Paint Dry Instead

Seriously, watch paint dry instead.

As someone in the middle of painting her living room, I can attest to the edifying effects of watching paint dry. Watching paint dry means that the wall was freshly painted, by myself and a friend in this case, and there’s a certain satisfaction to be had in standing back after 3 or 4 hours of backbreaking, arm-straining, ladder-balancing, neck-cricking work to admire a wall newly clad in the soft yet verdant tones of Benjamin Moore Regal Select Matte Finish HC-120 Van Alen Green¹. One has a feeling of accomplishment, of delight in the new aspect of the room, of a fresh take on an old classic. (The classic here referenced is “having walls.”)

The filmmakers of Moana 2 (2024) may wish to paint their own living rooms to experience some of that feeling, because they sure as hell ain’t gonna get it from watching the movie.

The first film, Moana (2016), affected my life and imagination in a profound way and I was excited to see how the story would be continued 8 years later. The first film skilfully blended aesthetics from across the Pacific to tell a story of identity and discovery that I found to be inspiring and meaningful. It was colorful, beautiful, and profound. Disney paid (a little) homage to various Pacific heritages and cultures, and the film served as a springboard for me to continue learning about the sea, sailing, Polynesia, wayfinding, and all manner of related topics. (I’ve listed some at the end of this post.) I attribute a significant percentage of my decision to become a professional mariner to the first Moana film. I rewatched it last week and it holds up really well. Seriously, go watch it. It’s one of those movies that can captivate adults as well as children - a true “family feature.”

And then I watched Moana 2.

Quick plot summary of Moana 2 (and I don’t think it’s possible to spoil the film because Disney already spoiled it, but blah blah spoilers whatever): Moana finds an ancient artifact which reveals that an ancient lightning god has hidden an ancient magical island under the sea. The god hid the island because if it was found, all the people of the ocean would be united and find each other and be friends, and this god feeds off of division. Yearning to find other islanders, Moana gathers a few crewmembers and her loyal chicken and heads out across the sea, picking up the demigod Maui on the way, to find the hidden island and reunite the people of the ocean. They get eaten by a giant clam, meet a bat goddess who imprisoned Maui in there for some reason, go through a portal in the clam (?) to a different part of the sea, bop around fighting sea monsters and having music montages for a bit, and then have a final show-down where they get past the lightning god, die but not really, raise the island, and dozens of other ocean people just kinda show up and they all go back to Moto Nui for some kava and a final song number.

You know, the classic Polynesian myth.

I waffled about whether to write anything at all, because I am a highly-qualified professional adult with a full life and real problems to handle and this post will probably come off as screed. It’s a little wierd for a grown-up to have beef with a Disney film.

But you know what’s wierder? Nipple jokes in a movie made for children.

We’ll get there.

Here we go.

Moana 2 had some beautiful artwork and animation, but I didn’t get a chance to look at it because the pacing of the movie had been set by a squirrel with ADHD. The filmmakers seemed to be desperately afraid I would look away from the screen if there wasn’t something violently goofy or sensationally colorful happening as fast as possible with no breaks from title to credits.

Some new characters were introduced, but I don’t remember any of their names because there was no relationship established between Moana and a single one of them. They all had the same personality - Quirky-Spastic. There was a love interest boy sort of introduced, and then they utterly failed to land that plane and nothing came of it. There were a couple new gods/goddesses introduced, but they were undeveloped and disconnected from the world of the movie and I don’t remember their names either.

There were some new songs, but they were spastic and forgettable. I haven’t counted words or minutes but the first film really worked to bring Polynesian words and Pacific-coded musical themes into the soundtrack, while maintaining the classic musical-theater style. Moana 2 felt more like a low-budget Disney Channel movie and I genuinely don’t remember the new songs, with one beautiful exception - the moment where Dwayne Johnson as Maui sings in Samoan to a seemingly dead Moana near the end of the film. Go listen, seriously.

All, and I mean all, of the original jokes and bits from the first movie were just used again in this one. One or two repeats would have been a call-back, but they used all the same bits.

In the same vein, all, and I mean all, of the original plot points from the first movie were just used again in this one. They used all the same plot points, and I’ll prove it. (Deep breath)

Girl has identity shift on home island, local folks are initially skeptical but come around. Girl goes to sea to discover/restore some element of her heritage related to a mythic curse, picks up Maui, runs into the little Kakamora coconut guys, goes to the underworld of the gods, and rolls up to the part of the ocean with a mean god or goddess who is trying to impede her passage to some spot of land that if reached will reverse the mythic curse. With the help of Maui and the anthropomorphized ocean swell, she sails in dramatic circles to confuse the god[dess] until Maui takes one for the team and loses a major part of what makes him a demigod. They take a breather and then finish the mission with the help of the reincarnated spirits of past ancestors. Then they roll home with a new and improved canoe and a new facet of previously forgotten cultural heritage and have a joyous reunion with the locals. Roll credits.

It’s the same movie.

Continuing on, in Moana (2016) the relationship between Maui as huge strong shirtless male demigod and Moana as normal human teenage girl traveling across the ocean together alone on a tiny canoe worked because a) it’s the tropics and b) they acted like an adult and a child and kept their hands to themselves.

In Moana 2, there was just a lot of touching. I remember shrinking down in my seat, wrinkling up my face to hide from the touching. Maui is huge and a male and shirtless. We get it. Everyone stop touching him and obsessing over him. It’s wierd. And since we’re here, there was more romantic chemistry between Moana and Maui than Moana and the love interest boy, who she only invited along on the expedition because he reminded her of Maui. And the boy was a bit of a chicken. Who was also obsessed with Maui and drew a portrait of himself with both hands on Maui’s chest. Not making this up. It was weird and didn’t make sense. And yeah there was a super super cringy nipple joke bit that had me like:

And perhaps the worst offense, the one that really grilled my cheese, came at the very end of the film. Moana succeeds at the mission and the island rises from the sea and she blows her seashell horn and hears an answer. She runs to the beach, and comes face to face with a man who just sailed in from a different island. He seemed to be inspired by people from New Caledonia or the Solomon Islands and let me tell you his design was beautiful and interesting and I got really excited because maybe, finally, at last we would get past the dumb nonsense of this cringy film and get a profound moment that would really evoke something, anything resembling a genuine human interaction.

And then he didn’t say anything.

And other ships show up on the horizon, ostensibly from different islands and ocean cultures.

And like, that’s it. They all sort of end up back at Moto Nui and have a kava ceremony and none of the new sailors really say anything. There’s the requisite wrap-up song and we see the newcomers and the home islanders interacting for a few seconds, and then it’s credits.

Tacking on about one minute of exciting beautiful new characters that resemble real-world cultures onto the end of this disorganized, stupid movie was just adding insult to injury. It was practically a taunt from the filmmakers. “See what beauty and diversity and wonder we’re capable of? And we didn’t do it. We got you to pay for something worthless instead.”

The whole movie was, quite frankly, insulting.

It was insulting to us, the viewers, who paid good money to be invited into the thoughtfully portrayed world of myth and beauty cultivated in the first film, and instead got a spastic, Americanized, shallow, confusing movie with not one original moment in it. It was insulting to our children, who deserve to be shown stories like the original Moana that portray connection, contemplation, courage, and even reverence, and instead got a thing like one of those Tik-Toks with AI editing and sped-up voice-overs. It was insulting to people of Pacific heritage who deserve respectful creative portrayal of their myths and legends, and instead got the most blatant cash-grab bastardization I’ve ever seen in my life.

The first film portrayed Moana not as a girl who wanted to “be free” from her constrictive village norms but as a girl who deeply longed for the sea as a natural result of her people’s heritage as voyagers and wayfinders. Moana struggled to reconcile that heritage with the strong pull of community, family, responsibility, and love of her island that also define her people. When Maui ruined the balance of the ocean world by stealing the heart of Te Fiti, Moana goes on a journey to restore the right relationship with the goddess in service to her people and her island. In so doing, she reconciles the pull of the sea and the pull of her island home by learning the art of navigation from Maui and becoming a master wayfinder. She takes those skills back to her island, and the last shot of the first movie is composed of a fleet of sailing canoes, the same fleet that originally sailed to the island, filled with island people and led by Moana, setting off across the great sea to live out their ancient identity as voyagers in community.

Not necessarily a classic Polynesian myth, but it worked.

None of that translated into the second film. The villagers sing of Moana “setting them free,” which is an obnoxiously American take on someone else’s traditional culture and doesn’t make any sense. There’s no natural imbalance to right, no relationships to restore, no reconciliation between contradictory traditions. That beautiful fleet of canoes we saw several times in the first movie disappeared and instead we got one huge canoe sailed across the ocean by a random boy-guy, an erratic and annoying woman engineer (?) who can’t shut up or focus, an elderly man who absolutely got press-ganged into a voyage he didn’t want, a pig, a chicken, and Moana I guess? and none of them know how to sail? What happened to that exciting vision that was already there? what happened? Seriously, what happened?

I’ll stop and say something here: No Polynesians asked me to write this review and be outraged on their behalf. I can’t speak for anybody but myself. I’m outraged on my own behalf as someone who learned about Polynesia and wayfinding a little bit from the first film, and grew to love and visit the real things in real life. I’m outraged as a sailor who has spent half her life over the past couple years on the Pacific ocean. I’m outraged as a lover of myth and storytelling and good movies.

I don’t mind wasting the money on the ticket. My $8 matinee admittance isn’t gonna make or break Disney’s bottom line. I do mind that Disney wasted not only my time, but all the enthusiasm and delight in this mythic world that they worked so hard to cultivate in the first film. They had some serious social capital with me, and presumably a lot of other people. And now it’s gone. They wasted it. They undermined their own integrity as a storytelling entity in our culture. And so they’ve deprived themselves of not only my money, but of what is much more precious: my attention. I won’t give it to them anymore. Ironic, as the filmmakers were clearly desperate to retain it.

But that’s okay.

Because neither of the Moana movies are the first or last word on anything. They are a tiny echo of a real song, a shimmer of color through a stained-glass window that implies a burning sun outside. The real things, the real wayfinders, the real Polynesians, the real Pacific - those are the things worth your delight and respect.

So please, don’t take your kids to go see Moana 2. They deserve better. They deserve the real thing.

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Okay, if painting your house as a palate-cleanser isn’t an option, have some genuinely good and interesting pieces of media about Pacific cultures instead:

1. The Orator (2011). The only film I’ve been able to find made in Samoa by Samoans entirely in the Samoan language. Very moving and contemplative - I loved it.

2. Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson : A phenomenal book about the movement of people across the Pacific and the Polynesian navigators.

3. Wayfinding by M.R. O’Connor : I listen to this audiobook at least once a year. Fascinating book about various human navigation traditions, including the Polynesians. (The chapter about Indigenous Australian land navigation shifted my soul little to the left.)

4. An Ocean In Mind by Will Kyselka: More detailed work on Polynesian wayfinding and navigation techniques. (Spoiler alert: it’s so cool.)

5. Hawaiki Rising by Sam Low: fantastic book about the Hawaiian Renaissance and the people involved in the building of the Hōkūle‘a.

6. We, The Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding In The Pacific: More detailed work on different Pacific wayfinding traditions beyond just Polynesia.

7. The Regenstein Halls of the Pacific at the Field Museum in Chicago, IL. I go there a few times a year just to wander among the artifacts and linger quietly in the Maori meeting house. It’s one of my favorite places in the United States.

8. Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdal. Yes yes yes, I know he was wrong about everything, but it’s SUCH a good book about the experience of sailing a handmade vessel across the Pacific ocean. The author was wrong and he did something amazing and the book slaps. Get over it.

9. The Island Of The Colorblind by Oliver Sacks: you don’t get medical expedition writing like this nowadays. I find this book both interesting and aspirational, as well as a precious window into some cultures that may be really difficult to visit in person.

10. A Marianas Mosaic: Signs and Shifts in Contemporary Island Life, edited by Ajani Burrell with Kinberly Bunts-Anderson. This one might be harder to find but it’s a fascinating collection of essays by authors from and in the Marianas archipelago, writing about contemporary topics that cover everything from poetry to ecology. I got this as a present when I was working in Saipan a year ago and it’s one of my favorite resources.

11. Lonely Planet South Pacific Phrasebook and Dictionary: I love this little guy.

12. ‘Ano Lani: ‘Ano Honua: A Spiritual Guide to the Hawaiian Lunar Calendar: I picked this up at a bookstore in Kona last year and it’s a fascinating look into the spiritual lives and calendar of the Hawaiian people. (So detailed <3)

13. Pacific Mythology: An Encyclopedia of Myth and Legend by Jan Knappert: really cool reference guide to a ton of figures and themes in mythology from all over the Pacific from Japan and SEA to Aotearoa and Easter Island. Not a storybook - more like an index.

14. Oceans In World History by Rainer Buschmann: really neat 30,000 ft overview of world oceanic cultures over time. Ignore the snobby one-star review on Amazon - I found this book to be a good introduction and springboard into deeper learning. Short but dense.

15. The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters In The Modern World by Wade Davis: Slightly more academic in tone but an absolute banger of a book. Does a fantastic job of eliciting humility, wonder, and love in the reader for the amazing things our fellow man can do.

1. Not sponsored. But seriously, when your dad said to spend the money on the good paint he was right. I feel like I live in a museum gallery now. Utterly life changing pro tip from the paint store lady (may she live forever): ditch the eggshell and do matte finish on interior walls. Thank me later.