{"id":4520,"date":"2025-12-16T15:00:37","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T22:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=4520"},"modified":"2025-09-23T20:56:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T02:56:13","slug":"movie-moana-2-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/16\/movie-moana-2-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"MOVIE: Moana 2 (2024)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MoanaMoana 2
<\/u><\/strong>Year: 2024
Rating: PG
Length: 100 minutes \/ 1.67 hours<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a trend in quite a few sequels that follow \u201ccoming-of-age\u201d stories where the main character must then step into a leadership position now that they\u2019ve figured out who they are. How to Train Your Dragon 2<\/em> (2014) did this, and Moana 2<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a02<\/em>, 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\u2019I Cravalho) learned her lesson that she doesn\u2019t have to do everything by herself, there\u2019s also the problem that Maui (Dwayne Johnson) is off doing his own similar thing\u2014which feels like a duplication of effort.<\/p>\n

When comparing to the original Moana<\/em><\/a> (2016), it\u2019s hard not to notice that the songs aren\u2019t as catchy or memorable. I also worry that the mid-credits scene here requires a third movie to complete this story (or the \u201cTrilogy Conundrum<\/a>\u201d I often point to in these situations). And while the visuals look great, there\u2019s almost a weird lack of a sense of space to know where anything is or where anything is happening. But if you\u2019re like me and just watching it with your kids, your kids will probably enjoy it for what it is.<\/p>\n

An OK sequel with a few too many moving pieces, I give Moana 2<\/em> 3.0 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n

\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"\u00a0\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"\u00a0\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moana 2Year: 2024Rating: PGLength: 100 minutes \/ 1.67 hours There\u2019s a trend in quite a few sequels that follow \u201ccoming-of-age\u201d stories where the main character must then step into a leadership position now that they\u2019ve figured out who they are. How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) did this, and Moana 2 (2024) also followed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,1199,2],"tags":[3845,502,6,1410,4339,4340,445,4338,13,8,34,4341],"class_list":["post-4520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3-0-stars","category-animated","category-movie","tag-3845","tag-coming-of-age","tag-disney","tag-dwayne-johnson","tag-leadership","tag-maui","tag-moana","tag-moana-2","tag-movie","tag-review","tag-sequel","tag-team"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4520"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4529,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520\/revisions\/4529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}