Okay, I finally realized Mulan was free on Disney+ and my opinion will be logged.
This is a prime example of how to cut a fairly decent trailer from a subpar film. Which I really hate to say, because I wanted it to do good.
- The visuals and fight sequences are good (if you have never seen The Matrix, Hero, or Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon).
- The acting is decent (if you have never seen a film with really great actors in it).
- The characters are interesting (if you have never seen the animated Mulan or simply any film that had more than two-dimensional characters).
The screenplay was terrible, frankly. I'm kind of surprised to see that the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy writers worked on this, since those films were far better; either they were slumming on this or the additional two writers really screwed things up.
None of the characters, even Mulan, were really penetrable or capable of evoking true emotion, but I do blame that on the screenplay more than the acting. The writing was so on the nose, very superficial, and/or too wordy.
Another problem is that so much of the film tried to do a "homage" to the animated version, but basically did all the scenes at about half their potency of the original. So it was like a garbled, watered-down version of some scenes from the animated film. it makes me more impressed with that original Mulan, where they got a lot of emotional impact out of the visuals and a condensed script -- each line packed far more punch, they didn't "over-talk" as they did here. Where was the script doctor? The matchmaker thing was lame and clumsy, the avalanche bit felt much more contrived, the climb up the stairs is less than compelling, the original fight in the line feels contrived, the conversation by the water where Mulan is almost caught ends in a lame way and so on... like ALL these scenes to do "homage" were like half-assed empty mimicry.
I felt like like the first hour of the film was junk. It started to come alive for me when Mulan and "the witch" meet up at the salt pools, and the witch pushes on her, and Mulan makes a choice about whether she is going to be herself and shine, or whether she is going to pretend to be something she is not. The next five minutes was like a different film.
Then it kind of went back into the crapper again and played out in expected hum-drum fashion. I actually laughed repeatedly in spots that were supposed to be dramatic. The script, again, was terrible. I don't know why anyone in Disney didn't see that, although they also pumped out that "Rise of Shitwalker" last Christmas, so... maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
I hate to reference the original film, but part of it was because that Mulan was bad at everything she tried, and all she had was love for her family. She actually wasn't a great warrior to start with (or end with, honestly -- she was adequate by the end -- she was more smart/wise than skilled). But that made her even more special -- it was always about her family, even if she made mistakes in how to show that at times.
here, the gist of the film tries to still pretend to be about family, but it ended up being more about "being who you are without apology." Which is not a bad lesson, but it then weakens their attempts to pull it back to the "family" thing.
And there were too many goddamn speeches. As an example, when she comes home, her father ends up giving a preachy explanation of what he values most. In the animated film, it's beautiful because it is all captured by the visual: Mulan formally bows and offers him the sword of Shan-Yu and the crest of the Emperor "as gifts to honor the Fa family" and as she kneels, he takes the offerings, dumps them on the ground, and sweeps her into his arms... only then simply saying, "The greatest gift and honor is having you as a daughter." ONE line, ONE action, and it packs quite a punch. One of the best qualities of Disney animated films are their efficiency: They tend to condense everything to the essential word or action and not waste effort (because it used to take a lot of effort to animate films, versus just shooting multiple takes).
That is what I mean about this film -- it didn't really know how to expertly communicate its ideas in powerful ways. It really thought its ideas were good enough, but what it really needed was the ability to execute and deliver on them to create emotion.
Anyway, a huge disappointment. I won't be rewatching, there's nothing to see.