Mulan (2020)
It’s no surprise to anyone that Disney has been on a kick recently of turning their animated films into live-action adaptations. I already covered this with my review of “Aladdin” (2019).
In all of their remakes so far, Disney has chosen to make a few changes to ‘modernize’ the story, but otherwise keep said movie relatively close to the original animated flick, without doing anything to bring the story closer to the actual original lore.
Until now, when they had a Chinese legend on the docket, for which they completely overhauled in favor of their new, biggest market.
Weird that Disney doesn’t seem to care about matching the lore for their upcoming “The Little Mermaid” remake.
Anyway.
This movie followed the same plot points as the 1998 ‘original,’ so if you’ve seen that, you know exactly how this story panned out. The only difference is the addition of a witch, who just kind of did things and didn’t add anything of value.
And there was a phoenix, that may or may not have been Mulan’s personal, persistent hallucination, because none of the other characters ever saw or reacted to it.
As “Mulan” is based on a Chinese legend (Aladdin-style), there was an awful lot of wiggle room that Disney could play with as far as what was happening on-screen, including physically impossible events. This bothered me, as it gave them the same accountability as if someone were to wake up at the very end and realize it was all a dream, but it did force me to accept a lot of stuff that I otherwise would have absolutely trashed this movie for.
There were a couple of things that Disney added to this movie that I think were supposed to qualify as “jokes for the adults in the audience so that taking your kids to the theater is more tolerable.”
First was that the emperor’s mouth didn’t move right, which was deeply unsettling. It looked like they somehow green-screened someone else’s lips onto his face, like a reference to bad dubbing from years gone by. “Kung Pow” (2001) did it better, and that movie was both stupid and nonsensical on purpose.
The other was the mid-air ninja acrobatics of anyone who was fighting anything at any given time, like you were probably acquainted with in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000). Which… great? I’m sure some of the adults in the audience liked it, but it felt like a weird addition.
Frankly, the addition of so much martial arts stuff felt ham-fisted. The animated movie didn’t have a major emphasis on it, and the constant displays didn’t add anything to the actual story. When I can reasonably assume that half of your fight scene is just you being held up by fishing line, the credibility and impressiveness of the choreography goes out the window.
Mulan’s (Yifei Liu) rebellion against societal norms and traditional gender roles was explained away as her having “strong chi.”
“Chi” was mentioned repeatedly through the first third of the movie, but left undefined until the Commander (Donnie Yen) revealed to basically just be ‘the Force’ from “Star Wars” (or ‘the Space’ from “Mission to Zyxx”), as it was an essence in-and-around everything and everyone at all times, but that only a select few could harness it.
I’m surprised that his sword didn’t spontaneously start glowing.
As the “Rohan” enemies (the guys who replaced the Huns) were approaching the Imperial City, there was a two-second scene of Buddhist monks climbing a flight of stairs. They hadn’t been shown anywhere else in the movie, nor was Buddhism ever mentioned, but the color of their robes was unmistakable.
Why is that weird?
Because the CCP has aggressively tried to curtail the religion and gone as far as to kidnap the reincarnation of the Dali Lama, which means some one of the Chinese advisors to the Disney film crew thought that should be added so that the CCP can pretend that they’re not being disgustingly awful to them.
Oh, and part of this movie was filmed in the Xinjiang Province where China is currently running work camps and genocide, so that’s a pretty messed up thing for Disney to be complicit in.
At one point earlier, the Rohan army was able to perfectly aim their catapult to hit small clusters of Chinese solders, but when Mulan pulled off a ghost army stunt and they turned to attack her, they missed so badly that they caused an avalanche.
Even earlier than that: when Mulan arrived at the training camp, the Commander explicitly said that bringing a woman to camp or consorting with women during training would result in death. Thus, when Mulan was revealed to be a woman, it would stand to reason that the Commander would kill her on the spot, but obviously he didn’t, or there wouldn’t have been a climax to the movie.
You know how I feel about breaking established rules.
The CGI to this was just so, so bad.
Every time someone did a mid-air jump, or magically used a piece of window dressing as a whip, it looked so corny, like Bollywood was hired to do the renderings.
I’m not willing to chalk that up to some kind of homage; it was just laziness, plain and simple. We all know what kind of products Disney can output when they want to, and this was them phoning it in.
The soundtrack was equally as miserable.
The closest they got to any of the original songs was a brief orchestral take on “Who I Am, Inside,” played on repeat.
As they haven’t done major revisions to the musical numbers for their other remakes, the only reason I can assume they removed everything here was that the Chinese audiences wouldn’t like it.
I realize that, supposedly, this take on the legend of Mulan is supposed to be closer to the actual legend, which is fine, but by giving it the same name as the animated classic, it creates an expectation that was absolutely not fulfilled. They could have at least titled it “The Legend of Mulan” to establish the difference.
I would give this movie a 1-Claw, but Megan thinks it deserved a 3.
I’m averaging at 2-Claws, because it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve seen this year.
Do not pay Disney+ any money for cow-towing to the Chinese Communist Party.
They do not deserve it and they should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.
Spend $30 and 115 minutes on just about anything else.
