Moana 2 Review | A Breezy, Passable Musical That Strives to Be a Fun Ride

I remember watching Moana back in 2016, and in my review, I said that despite the movie following a very generic template, unlike movies like Zootopia, it had a lot of fun elements to keep us hooked to the content. While the first movie was designed as an introduction to that whole world, the sequel, Moana 2, has the responsibility of expanding that world with something fresh. Even though the core idea of breaking the divide-and-rule theory of the villain makes the story part of the movie interesting, compared to the first part, there is a significant drop in the amount of laugh-out-loud moments.

So, a few years after the events we saw in the first movie, Moana is right now exploring the sea to find other people. At one point, she gets this vision in which her ancestor Tautai Vasa tells her that she must find the island named Motufetu, which has been hidden by a storm God named Nalo. What we see in Moana 2 is her expedition to find this island with her crew and how Maui eventually helps her in that mission.

In terms of how the story is structured and the drama is set, there is nothing much here to complain about, as they have managed to blend all the fantasy elements neatly into the template motivational structure of an animated film. But the drop in entertainment because of the lack of genuinely exciting moments is visible. When I saw Moana, I remember laughing out loud, and there were these cheeky dialogues about Twitter in that movie. But in Moana 2, it is very difficult to find such memorable lines. Because of the grandeur of the events, you are engaged for the run time of one hour and forty minutes, but the recall value of scenes is pretty much on the lower side.

It felt like they were lingering onto certain moments for far too long, and just when you start to feel like telling the movie to move to the next event, the musical part will take control, and the songs will kick in. The visual choreography of all the musical bits is top-notch. But the lyrics aren’t strong or rhyming enough to give us those goosebumps. And some of the foreshadowing dialogues are very obvious. Some may argue that it is a movie that will have kids as the major audience, and it is okay to repeat the same structure. But aren’t we living in the same universe that had movies like Inside Out and Zootopia? The voice acting is fine, but the lack of gist in the writing is affecting the overall energy.

On the whole, Moana 2 is an inferior sequel that is passable due to its generic gags and visual grandeur. The vision of making the world of Moana bigger by using the idea of connecting people and also this empowered woman trope is all great. But like I said, the back-to-back laughter package one experienced in the first movie is not there in this one, and because of that, the mid-credit scene, which obviously hints about a possible sequel, just didn’t excite me.