PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Sept 18, 2020 18:58:39 GMT -5
Yes, I ended up shelling out the 30 bucks for this.
I don't know quite where to begin with this live action Mulan, other than to say it's not as good as the original. Obviously. But here in 2020, I'm so starved for new movies that my will is weak, so here I am reviewing it. Okay, so this movie is such a mixed bag. On the positive side, the technical components of this film are pretty well-done. The cinematography is great, the production design is stunning and the color palette is vibrant. Also, the movie does a respectable job of committing to the grounded, war movie tone director Niki Caro was going for. The fight sequences themselves are...decent enough, but sort of hindered somewhat by certain editing choices and techniques. When it's focused on the brewing conflict at the center of the plot, things are fairly interesting and engaging. The film also does a decent job with a number of the more quiet, character-driven moments, and I thought Yifei Liu was solid in the title role. Where the movie starts running into some issues...well, let's start with the tone. As I said, Niki Caro clearly is going after a more serious, realistic feel -- except for when she also has to put in some of the more Disney-ish touches. Whenever she does, it creates this tonal imbalance that makes things feel slightly awkward. But also, the humor feels kind of half-hearted, and the fellow warriors that Mulan befriends at the training camp aren't nearly as charming or funny or even memorable as they are in the animated film. I don't think I even remember their names. Another thing: in this movie, Mulan is shown to be quite skilled in combat and the like basically from the very beginning. Now, in the animated film, she really had to fight to prove herself -- not only because of the gender thing, but also because she didn't know how to fight. In turn, that added to the conflict of her journey and provided the strong basis and throughline of that awesome Make A Man Out Of You song. It made her mastering the skills that much more rewarding in that version. Here, there's really none of that. Since she's already good at all this stuff, where's the struggle for her? It's an example of the movie leaning perhaps too far into its feministic stance and just one of the many ways it seems to get things only half-right. Now that I've written some of these points down, I might have just talked myself down from two and half stars to two stars, but I don't know, this Mulan remake is so middle-of-the-road that I have a hard time feeling that passionate about it one way or the other.
**1/2 /****
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Sept 18, 2020 19:00:58 GMT -5
Lol
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Sept 18, 2020 19:03:01 GMT -5
Please tell me you didn't pay $30 for that thing...
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Sept 18, 2020 19:03:54 GMT -5
Please tell me you didn't pay $30 for that thing... Read the first line I wrote. |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Sept 18, 2020 19:09:50 GMT -5
Please tell me you didn't pay $30 for that thing... Read the first line I wrote. Oh, that wasn't on the Letterboxed version I read. |
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Sept 18, 2020 19:11:31 GMT -5
Read the first line I wrote. Oh, that wasn't on the Letterboxed version I read. Figured I'd need to get it out in the open more on here than on there. |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 8, 2021 20:44:33 GMT -5
Mulan(1/24/2021)
I have mostly avoided the trend of Disney making live action remakes of their animated classics like Aladdin and The Lion King but I had held out hope that their Mulan remake might be an exception to that lackluster trend, firstly because the original Mulan is a far from perfect movie that had plenty of room for improvement and secondly because they seemed to be turning it into a large scale martial arts epic, which is something that appeals to me. Then the movie’s release got delayed five months by the pandemic before being released to Disney+ through a downright offensive ripoff of a release strategy that would have required subscribers to pay $30 for the privilege of seeing the movie on a TV screen, something I had no intention of paying even if the movie was great and by all accounts it wasn’t. So now four months after that the movie is now streaming for free with that service, but I must say that having seen it probably would have disappointed under pretty much any circumstance.
The most memorable part of the original Mulan was probably the music, which was earwormy even by Disney standards… and those are all gone here. I get why, putting musical sequences into a live action wuxia movie based on martial conflict probably would have seemed odd and I probably would have made the same decision. They also cut out mushu the dragon, a sidekick animal voiced by Eddie Murphy in the original, which again makes perfect sense as a cut. The problem is that that original movie was kind of creaky to begin with and without these elements it feels increasingly empty. That wouldn’t have been a problem had they done a bit more to adapt the film and make up for what they cut but they kind of don’t, aside from those omissions it’s actually a lot more true to the original than I expected at least on a structural and story level and still inherits a lot of its flaws. There are other execution problems here; for one the film’s Mulan is uniquely unconvincing while masquerading as a man and the fellow soldiers look like blind idiots when they’re fooled by this charade. Also as an action movie it’s… lacking, especially when compared to the actual martial arts epics coming out of China that it’s clearly trying to imitate. The choreography here is pedestrian when compared to something like The House of Flying Daggers or Red Cliff and most of the side characters are pretty dull. In fact that whole movie is pretty dull, it’s kind of every bit the soulless cash grab those other Disney remakes seem like.
** out of Five
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