Live-Action Spectacle Earns Its Voyage

Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Phoenix Film Critics Society

The demigod fills the frame, tattoos crawling across his bare chest like they have somewhere better to be, and for nearly four minutes “Moana” drops narrative altogether in favor of pure spectacle — golden light, swinging hips, a coconut-crab entourage, and Dwayne Johnson selling every syllable of “You’re Welcome” like he invented showmanship. It’s the loudest, brightest, most purely joyful sequence in Disney’s live-action reimagining of “Moana,” and it plays like something built for a theme park stage rather than a soundstage outside Atlanta. That’s not a knock. That’s the whole appeal.

Ten years after the animated original became a modern Disney classic, director Thomas Kail (“Hamilton,” “Fosse/Verdon”) brings Moana’s voyage back to screens with Catherine Lagaʻaia, in her feature debut, as the headstrong 16-year-old chief’s daughter who defies her father and sails beyond the reef of Motunui to restore her people’s prosperity — with Johnson reprising his shape-shifting demigod Maui, this time in flesh, tattoo ink and ti-leaf skirt rather than pixels.

A lot of ink has been spilled this week arguing the film is redundant — a cash grab arriving barely a decade behind source material that hasn’t had time to go stale. I’d argue the opposite. This is a loyal, lovingly built adaptation that, in its best moments, feels every bit as magical as its predecessor, arguably more so, and it earns that magic through craft rather than nostalgia alone.

Much of it starts with Lagaʻaia. Cast from a pool of more than 32,000 audition submissions, she brings an unforced physicality and warmth to Moana that never reads as an impression of Auliʻi Cravalho’s voice performance — she simply is the character, graceful in the ceremonial scenes, scrappy and unpolished the moment she’s alone on the water. Johnson, for his part, seems to be having the time of his life. Maui’s design and bearing were built in direct homage to Johnson’s late grandfather, the Samoan high chief and wrestler Peter Maivia, and that personal weight comes through in the quieter scenes as much as it does in the showstoppers.

Visually, this is one of the more successful marriages of live performance and digital effects in Disney’s remake cycle. Cinematographer Oscar Faura and visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer keep Maui’s shapeshifting and the ocean’s watery sleight of hand looking tactile rather than weightless, and production designer John Myhre’s 10-acre Motunui set — built from scratch, its fale hand-lashed with coconut fiber rather than a single nail — gives the film a lived-in texture no greenscreen alone could fake. The production’s insistence on cultural authenticity, guided by a Cultural Trust of Pacific scholars, artisans and wayfinders, pays off in details a casual viewer won’t consciously clock but will feel: the specific tapa-cloth patterns on Moana’s wrap, the hand-carved detail on Maui’s fishhook, the sheer number of Pacific Islander faces filling the village behind her.

The music, mostly unchanged from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foaʻi and Mark Mancina’s original songbook, still lands. “We Know The Way” remains a goosebump-raiser performed by a full ensemble of Pacific Islander voices, and the new addition “Along The Way,” sung by Lagaʻaia, Johnson and Cravalho over the credits, earns its place better than most legacy bonus tracks manage. But nothing tops “You’re Welcome” for sheer craft — a number so saturated with color and choreography, courtesy of Tiana Nonosina Liufau’s Pacific-rooted dance work, that it’s easy to picture the whole sequence transplanted directly to a Disney World stage without losing a beat.

Is a live-action remake of a film not yet 10 years old strictly necessary? No. But necessity has never been the right test for whether something is worth watching, and on craft alone, this “Moana” earns its 115 minutes. It’s gorgeous, it’s sincere, and it treats its Pacific setting and collaborators with real respect rather than surface-level borrowing.

For Images Arizona readers who grew up with the original or are introducing it to a new generation this summer, this is a rare Disney remake worth the theater ticket rather than the eventual streaming scroll. Beyond the reef, this “Moana” still has somewhere worth going.

★★★★