‘Moana’ Movie Review: Dwayne Johnson and Catherine Laga'aia Captain This Live-Action Shipwreck

Ten years is not a long time to wait for nostalgia to kick in, but Disney has never been one to let a gap in the release calendar go unfilled. Moana, the studio's latest animated-to-live-action conversion, arrives a decade after the original swept audiences off Motunui's shores and became a $687 million global hit. The story hasn't moved: a headstrong island girl answers the call of the ocean, teams up with a preening demigod to save her people from a spreading blight, and learns of her wayfinding ancestors who dared to venture beyond the reef. 

It arrives, too, with a trailer that did it no favours. Released to a wave of derision earlier this year, it became the kind of clip YouTube comment sections exist for - brutal, gleeful, entirely convinced Disney had made another Snow White-sized misstep. That backlash set the bar for the finished film somewhere around the floor, which makes it easier to say plainly: Moana clears it. This remake was never necessary, but the trailer undersold it badly, and the finished film is a better watch than that campaign ever let on. 

Director Thomas Kail, making his feature debut after a career built on Hamilton, inherits a screenplay credited to original writer Jared Bush alongside Dana Ledoux Miller, and treats it with the caution of someone handling a museum piece rather than adapting a story. Plot beats, needle drops, even individual line readings track closely to the 2016 cut. Moana, played by Catherine Laga'aia, a 19-year-old Samoan-Australian making her feature film debut, leaves the reef to find Maui, brought to live-action by Dwayne Johnson, reprising the role he voiced in the franchise's animated films, and together they set out to return the heart of Te Fiti and lift the curse creeping across oceans. 

What's changed is the frame around it, and that fidelity is exactly where the film loses steam through its middle stretch. Anyone who knows the 2016 version going in won't find a single surprise here, because the film isn't interested in offering one. That's less of a pacing problem than a predictability problem — the open-ocean, island-hopping middle plays out beat for beat as expected, and knowing exactly what's coming next drains it of the tension the first film built naturally. Heihei and Pua, the rooster and pig who became breakout characters in physical comedy and adorableness are one of the few places the photorealism actually pays off as both look genuinely better rendered here than in the animated original.  

Laga'aia is solid in the title role — she plays Moana without reaching for the swagger of the animated version, finding something more grounded instead, but it's Johnson who ends up stealing the film, naturally. His Maui, wig and all, commits fully to the bit in a way that borders on self-parody, and the character's odd, deliberately-nippleless, CGI-assisted physique has become a punchline in its own right online, yet somehow it works in his favour: he leans into the absurdity rather than fighting it, and the jokes land because he's visibly having more fun than anyone else in the cast. Rena Owen as Gramma Tala, gets the film's few scenes that land as felt rather than replicated, and John Tui and Frankie Adams, portraying Moana's parents, do steady work. 

Composer Mark Mancina returns, as do songwriters Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Fo'ai, and the songs retain the same reliable pleasure they had in 2016 — little reinvention, but nothing lost either. Cinematography and production design lean hard into location shoots across Hawaii, and the physical sets have a tactile quality the VFX-heavy stretches lack, as the film is at its best when it trusts the real coastline over the rendered one. 

In the end, Moana is okay at best. It isn't a disaster on the scale of Disney's worst live-action missteps, and it's a considerably better film than the trailer let on. But it isn't a great adaptation either. This is the most copy-paste of Disney's remakes yet, repeating exact lines and shots from the 2016 original rather than reinterpreting them, and it never comes close to the brilliance of the animated film. Johnson's committed, scene-stealing Maui and Laga'aia's steady, well-cast Moana are enough to carry it through the weaker stretches. Moana doesn't sink, but it just never quite matches what it's copying.