Moana 2
MOANA 2
When I first saw a preview for Disney's Moana 2 a couple months back, my response was probably similar to that of many childless adults: “Who asked for this?” Well, I got my answer at the sold-out 9:55 a.m. screening I caught in Chicagoland last Wednesday, and it was the same answer we all got when the Thanksgiving-weekend box-office tallies were revealed: “Everyone, apparently.” Earning $221 million domestic over five days, this animated-musical sequel is a genuine phenomenon – already the eighth-highest grosser of 2024 – and the crowd I saw it with dutifully laughed at the gags, “Aw-w-w-w”ed our heroine's precocious toddler sister, and applauded when, at the finale, the title blasted into view with a Lion King-y “Thunk!!!” Their reaction was understandable. It's the exact same movie they no doubt adored eight years ago, only with vaguer threat and weaker songs.
You enjoyed the determination and pluck our of titular voyageur (again voiced, beautifully, by Auli'i Cravalho) as she attempted to do right by her fellow Polynesians and ghostly ancestors? She's twice as determined and plucky here, captaining a somewhat rickety aquatic vessel in search of long-missing islanders. You dug Dwayne Johnson as the wisecracking, heavily tattooed demigod Maui? The character is as buff and snarky as ever, this time trading his awareness of Disney clichés for knowledge about the future. (Upon making a butt-dial joke, Maui says, “That'll be funny in 2,000 years” … leaving you to wonder why he's so concerned about Moana's fate when he must already know how everything will turn out.) You loved Moana's pet pig and cross-eyed rooster and the waves that served up high-fives? They're all back, albeit with more involvement from the pig and a conspicuous lack of assistance from the water. Adding the blessing conferred by grandma, the ambulatory-coconut warriors, the typhoon, the shipwreck, and songs that follow the original's presentational blueprint to the letter (happy group number leading to power ballad leading to patter tune leading to sappy ballad leading to heavenly choir), and directors David Derrick Jr.'s, Jason Hand's, and Dana Ladoux Miller's outing is almost numbing in its sameness. It may as well have been titled Moana, Too.
Bored as I was, though, I never fell asleep, mostly because I was routinely trying to figure out what was going on. I could never make heads or tails of the motivations behind the villainous storm god Nalo, who wanted to separate the Polynesian islands for reasons passing understanding. (Reportedly, this otherwise unseen nemesis makes a mid-credits appearance that may provide a clue, but as this wasn't Marvel's Moana, I didn't stick around for the possibility of finding out.) I'm still not sure what to make of the weird bat wrangler Matangi (Awhimai Fraser), whose introduction finds her torturing Maui but who later provides Moana with a vital escape strategy … right before vanishing for the remainder of the film. And why, from the start, is our heroine enduring such a crisis of conscience over whether she should follow her nautical-adventurer leanings or help lead her people when it's blindingly clear that she can do both? Maybe there's a beneficial Life Lesson for kids in there somewhere – yes, girls, you can have career and family! – but in 2024, it's hard to buy that even young grade-schoolers would need to be taught that.
Before Moana 2 became a cash-gobbling cineplex sequel, the material was originally intended for a streaming limited series on Disney+. This might help explain why the movie feels so disjointed (maybe we needed a few more hours to fill in the narrative gaps), and would certainly explain the absence of Moana composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose songwriting duties went to the lesser-known team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear. They're obviously gifted – the duo's The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical won the 2022 Grammy for Musical Theater Album – yet Barlow and Bear don't treat us to a single number here that's in any way clever or memorable, and some of the lyrics, particularly on Johnson's “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?”, make you wince. (While I admire The Rock's refusal to let tone-deafness get in the way of his crooning enthusiasm, we all deserve better than “Moana, come on-a, unlock your destiny.”) Disney's latest is certainly postcard-pretty, and every once in a while, it even made me chuckle; I wasn't the only grown-up to giggle at the kidney-stone routine, and I'm embarrassed by how tickled I was when Maui nicknamed the pig and rooster “Bacon and Eggs.” Otherwise, I'd suggest that this one's for Moana die-hards only. Thankfully for the studio, there appear to be a lo-o-o-ot of them out there.
BLITZ
Written and directed by 12 Years a Slave Oscar winner Steve McQueen, the World War II drama Blitz (which recently began streaming on Apple+) is one of the stranger movies I've seen in recent years: a fiercely realistic visual spectacle frequently undone by impossible-to-believe characters and situations. Beginning with the opening sequence that finds a firefighter team's water hose wreaking havoc like a malevolent serpent, there are truly extraordinary passages in this tale of a young boy's epic journey during the bombings on Britain. Yet everything that's grand about the film is weirdly off-set by its intentionally Dickensian leanings, with our Oliver Twist-y protagonist forever running into one cartoonish Fagin or Nancy or Artful Dodger after another. I wanted to feel for the traumatized kid. Instead, I kept waiting for the cast to break into spirited, wildly inappropriate renditions of “Consider Yourself.”
An introductory title card explains that during the blitzkrieg of the early 1940s, 1.25 million people evacuated the continually besieged London, more than half of them children. Blitz focuses on one such child – nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan) – who is begrudgingly sent to the presumed safety of the countryside by his single, munitions-worker mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan). Not at all wanting to leave his home, mum, and beloved granddad (Paul Weller), George tells Rita he hates her as he boards the train. Guilt soon overtakes him, though, and after the train is several miles en route, George hops off to make his painstaking way back to London on foot.
So far, so good. Newcomer Heffernan proves himself a captivating, watchful presence; Ronan, apparently playing the only platinum blond in '40s England, exudes natural warmth and empathy; musician Weller boasts a lovely gravitas; and McQueen, a tremendous artist, does a first-rate job of demonstrating the casually cruel racism behind the myth of a wholly unified British front. (George, a mixed-race child whose father was deported before his birth, is treated with disdain by adult strangers and abominably by fellow youths both on the train and in his own neighborhood.) And despite what I'm guessing was a meager-for-Apple-dough budget – interestingly, even rough estimates on the cost aren't found online – the movie looks and sounds spectacular, that opening conflagration and hose-snake attack just the first of visual and aural wonders to come. Everything seems to fall apart, however, the moment George jumps from that train.
First, upon realizing that a walking trek is unfeasible, he hops aboard another train, where the compartment George finds himself in also houses a trio of sibling urchins whose artificial cutesiness suggests unsuccessful hopefuls at a Newsies cattle call. Then he runs into a Nigerian police officer (Benjamin Clémentine), a figure so helpful and saintly that you just know he'll be dead within minutes. (In his showcase scene, this kindly man defuses a potentially violent row between a Muslim, a Jew, and a Protestant – which feels like the setup to an unacknowledged bar joke.) Then George falls into the clutches of dastardly jewel thieves (led by a supremely hambone Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke) who need a tiny person to sneak in through the broken windows of abandoned storefronts. And then, the kid finds himself in a tunnel of the London underground, where he becomes the savior of refugees in a devastating flood – an act of heroism that McQueen perversely refuses to show us. So much incident! So little sense! One scene after another appears to exist merely as a contrived excuse to not let George get home until the two-hour mark, and all of the actors involved, grave little Heffernan excepted, telegraph their intentions with such lack of subtlety that it seems McQueen doesn't even want us to believe in the child's plight. But if that were the case, why make the war atrocities so harrowing? What's the point of ultra-realistic bombing catastrophes if you can't accept those suffering as people?
I wish I could say that the scenes – the too-many scenes – with Saoirse Ronan were much better, but they're really not. It takes an unconscionably long time for Rita to even learn that her son is missing, and before she does, we watch as Rita sings live for the radio, supports her fellow machinists in an on-air protest, fails to enjoy a night out with the girls, and has a mild flirtation with a handsome neighbor (Harris Dickinson's Jack) who's obviously in love with her … . None of it is necessary – Jack eventually vanishes without explanation or closure – and all of it merely distracts from both Blitz's central narrative and McQueen's successful equating of British intolerance with the period's more evident forms of fascism. As in the George scenes, there are terrific moments to be found in the Rita subplot, particularly the fiery speech given by actor Leigh Gill (the Joker films' Gary Puddles) as he attempts to instill some order in the British underground. Also as in the George scenes, though, the overriding motif is fraudulence. The historical facts may be true – citizens did indeed take to hiding, and forming makeshift communities, in the tunnels – but here, they play as little more than conceits designed merely to get characters from points A to B to C.
I think it says something, though, that McQueen's most satisfying, frightening sequence is also its most initially puzzling. Roughly halfway through the movie, the setting abruptly shifts to a dazzling nightclub where the richest of the rich are enjoying a glamorous affair, the orchestra's excitable bandleader wowing the crowd like a West End Cab Calloway. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux's camera swoops and spins among the chic clientele, and the vignette goes on and on, and you can't tell if what you're seeing is actually a flashback to happier times for the Brits, as the picture has already been rife with flashbacks. (The scene of George's dad being hauled away by the authorities, other Londoners of color watching in silent defeat, bears a striking resemblance to the hanging of Solomon in 12 Years a Slave, when fellow slaves went about their business pretending not to notice the atrocity in front of them.) But then the merriment stops as one party guest after another begins hearing a strange noise from far overhead – one that will prove to be the sound of dropping bombs. A blackout follows, and the next time we see these people, they're all dead, but with no visible damage, their lungs having exploded from the seismic power of nearby detonations. It's a nightmarish image – the film's most haunting one – and an ingeniously delayed shock. It's also evidence of just what McQueen might've accomplished had he not devoted quite so much time and energy toward turning Blitz into Oliver!
