Moana 2
Year: 2024
Rating: PG
Length: 100 minutes / 1.67 hours
There’s a trend in quite a few sequels that follow “coming-of-age” stories where the main character must then step into a leadership position now that they’ve figured out who they are. How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) did this, and Moana 2 (2024) also followed this formula. While the first movie usually does a great job of having the main character overcome an obstacle to achieve their goal, leadership is often much more complicated to convey and requires more moving pieces.
While rounding out the group dynamic for these kinds of movies is fine for providing a wider range of talents to pull from, with Moana 2, most of these characters felt one-dimensional because they had almost no presence in the previous film to establish their core abilities. The only one that had any previous background was the foe-to-friend Kakamora. And while Moana (Auli’I Cravalho) learned her lesson that she doesn’t have to do everything by herself, there’s also the problem that Maui (Dwayne Johnson) is off doing his own similar thing—which feels like a duplication of effort.
When comparing to the original Moana (2016), it’s hard not to notice that the songs aren’t as catchy or memorable. I also worry that the mid-credits scene here requires a third movie to complete this story (or the “Trilogy Conundrum” I often point to in these situations). And while the visuals look great, there’s almost a weird lack of a sense of space to know where anything is or where anything is happening. But if you’re like me and just watching it with your kids, your kids will probably enjoy it for what it is.
An OK sequel with a few too many moving pieces, I give Moana 2 3.0 stars out of 5.
