Moana

Moana hit theaters July 10, 2026, ten years after the animated original: a live-action remake from Walt Disney Pictures. Some remakes are boring and detrimental. Some are honorable adaptations. Then there is Moana 2026, which is back to boring: a scene-for-scene remake of the original animation.

The 2016 story survives intact because they carried it into live action with tweezers. A millennium ago, the demigod Maui stole the Heart of Te Fiti, and that theft unleashed a darkness eating the ocean and islands ever since. On Motunui, a chief’s daughter named Moana gets chosen by the ocean to return the heart, defies her father’s ban on sailing past the reef, and sets out to find Maui and drag him back to the scene of his crime. Catherine Lagaʻaia makes her film debut in the title role. Dwayne Johnson returns as Maui, trading the recording booth for a forty-pound prosthetic muscle suit and a wig with its own gravitational field.

Disney photocopied its own homework and called it a movie. Every song from 2016 returns, arranged the same way, in the same order, at the same story beats. The single new Lin-Manuel Miranda track, “Along the Way,” gets exiled to the end credits, where it plays over names you will skip because you already left. The plot hits every beat of the original with the mathematical accuracy of Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot Psycho remake, a comparison IndieWire made and one I am co-signing. The changes amount to trivia-night answers: Maui’s botched shapeshift now gives him a hammerhead instead of a great white, Tamatoa’s David Bowie eyes got a recolor, Pua the pig got cut down to a cameo, and Moana’s mother lost her personality somewhere between casting and the set.

This remake runs 111 minutes. The original ran 107. Disney added four minutes, mostly from things taking a little longer. The animated film does not waste time. This one feels slowed down without anything new filling the space. A basic movie for basic people: the Starbucks pumpkin-spice and Ugg-boots demographic from the 2010s meme. Moana 2026 is not bad. Not great. Not good. Comfortably mediocre. At that point, just watch the original. There is no advantage to this film over 2016 in any way.

I would call what they delivered Hyper Animated. Disney marketed live action and shipped an animated movie with significantly poor lighting. The ocean is CGI. The islands are mostly CGI. The Kakamora, the lava demon Te Kā, Heihei, Pua: all CGI and heavily look like it. Commend them for not gutting beloved designs the way Snow White or The Lion King remakes did. At that point these are just poorly animated characters. Why would I not watch the original?

Dwayne Johnson’s Maui sits dead center of the uncanny valley. Fake rubber suit. Fake hairpiece. Why not cast someone who does not look like he is in his mid-fifties, the way Johnson does? He looks like an older guy under cosmetics. Never Maui. Always Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Catherine Lagaʻaia, on the other hand, is great. Strong performance. Strong singing voice. Still does not top Auliʻi Cravalho from 2016, and this is still a very strong Moana adaptation on its own.

The boredom arrives early and signs a lease. Every scene the original blitzed through in ninety seconds now gets two full minutes of reverent staging. Slow pacing that will have adults fighting a nap. Real talk about my screening: after “You’re Welcome,” Johnson’s iconic number around the forty-minute mark, I considered leaving. That was supposed to be the big Maui moment, and from there the movie rolls downhill. My strongest emotional response of the night was debating whether I could ethically review a film I only saw fifty minutes of. I stuck it out. Eventually it ends. That is the nicest thing anyone has said about this movie.

A family of four will spend nearly $60 before popcorn. Lagaʻaia delivers a debut worth remembering. The movie around her is a slower, darker, emptier photocopy of a film you already own, know, and love. Banished to the Backlog. 4.0 out of 10. Harmless. A complete waste of time.