It’s been eight years since audiences last saw Moana on the big screen, and three years in the context of that film since Moana embraced the calling of the sea as a wayfinder and embarked on a journey to reach other Pacific islands and connect with their people. And yet, it’s only at the end of Moana 2 that it feels like her journey has actually begun. For a story that so prizes how far its heroine will go, Moana spends so much of this sequel stuck in a rut.
Moana has certainly been busy sailing out to new islands, discovering artifacts left behind by islanders long past and bringing her findings back to her people. One day, she’s struck by a lightning bolt of inspiration from her ancestors, telling her of a distant sunken island that once acted as a hub, connecting all the various tribes across the ocean, but is currently being obscured and cursed by an ancient god named Nalo. It now falls to Moana to go farther than she ever has before to tame the angry god and restore the island to its glory.
That’s essentially the plot of the first Moana, right down to our eponymous heroine having a crisis of faith over whether her quest is too big for her. That’s a problem she resolved last time, too, and that was when she didn’t have three capable members of her tribe along for the ride, providing food, inventions, extra manpower, and, of course, comic relief.
That was also when she had a demigod, Dwayne Johnson’s Maui, by her side, who was only a detriment due to needing to think about someone other than himself and his legacy for once. Moana 2 only barely moves the arc of his character forward to show he’s become a better man. He’s not in her way, but he’s still egomaniacal in a way that makes no sense from where we left him eight years ago. And, no, being a loud cheerleader for Moana when she gets low doesn’t quite count as growth, especially given how generic his fight song, “Can I Get a Chee-Hoo,” is.
That’s not to single out that song per se, as all of the songs this time around feel like background noise. Say what you will about Lin-Manuel Miranda—among other things, he can be too cute and nerdy by half when a scene demands severity—but his songs are always inseparable from the characters singing them. Here, you could swap around the new batch of songs among each member of the cast and, aside from one admittedly excellent stretch of nerdy rap bars from Rose Matafeo’s quirky inventor Loto, they would still have the same effect.
At the very least, Moana 2 soars when it gets down to the business of being a large-scale seafaring epic. The first film’s delightful Kakamora tribe gets a little more backstory, and so its members become more than just an excuse for extremely fun Mad Max-style piracy on the open seas. Their temporary alliance with Moana and her crew to kill a clam the size of an island results in one hell of a thrilling action beat, which is bested later by the finale at the heart of a cursed lightning storm, with our heroes beset on all sides by vicious sea creatures.
Both sequences are breathtakingly animated, and awash in the drama and tension the film desperately needs. That fight in the storm kickstarts a series of events that, as a genuinely imposing threat presents itself, finally makes it feel like the world that Moana inhabits is expanding in a meaningful way. And all those elements fall into place right when the credits start rolling, making Moana 2 feel even more like we’ve just spent eight years floating in place.
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