Anthony Salgado

Aja Romano reviewed it perfectly. Though it may be the most highly anticipated of all Disney’s recent remakes, spiritually, there’s little connective tissue between the 2020 version and its predecessor. But then, there’s also little connective tissue within the new film. Instead, for all its screenplay’s threadbare talk about the importance of cultivating deep understanding, Mulan stays superficial and perfunctory. It gets down to business and little else. Mulan’s few bright spots can’t save it from clunky writing To a degree, every one of Disney’s recent string of live-action adaptations of its animated classics has had to justify itself — its reason for existing. The many films Disney has tried to put new spins on have ranged from beloved ’90s films whose remakes failed to serve much purpose, like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, to older films, like Dumbo and The Jungle Book, which unquestionably benefited from applying more progressive contemporary lenses to their initially problematic tellings. Mulan seems to fall outside of these two extremes. The 1998 animated film won high critical praise and legions of devoted fans. The plot of this version of Mulan is fairly simple: Mulan has been struggling to behave as a proper young lady when she learns her aging father has been drafted into the emperor’s army. Disguising herself as a man, Mulan joins the regiment in her father’s place. There, she learns to fight, builds character, and makes friends with the guys. After her gender is inadvertently revealed and she faces disgrace, she chooses to fight as a girl, ultimately saving the emperor, winning honor, and becoming a hero. It’s all straightforward, but the presence of lots of fun side characters, a few strong musical numbers, and thrilling battle sequences, all gorgeously animated, make the original Mulan a standout in the Disney canon. There’s plenty of potential for expansion and development in its narrative about the Chinese folk hero Hua Mulan, who rose to fame as a great warrior after risking her honor and her life to join the army in an era where no women were allowed. Hua Mulan is the stuff of legend, and like all legends, her character can stand the tests of revision and recalibration. The film also has some awkward cultural stereotyping to undo; and as a story where the hero unquestionably defends the Chinese empire, the new film could also have done more to critique the geopolitics of the 1998 film through the lens of this era of protests and populism. But the new Mulan doesn’t seem concerned with deeper characterization, deeper world-building, or even a deeper plot. Sure, it’s stylish, colorful, and decently acted, with entertaining action sequences. Overall, though, the movie is a rote, flat, paint-by-numbers version of the story you already know. There is some new stuff added to Disney’s 2020 take on Mulan. In particular, where the first film’s villain was an invading, genocidal child-killer, Mulan’s primary antagonists are both new characters, Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and the fighting female sorcerer Xianniang (Li Gong), who each have their own reasons for standing against the emperor. Their backstories and individual motives could have made for a rich and complicated story arc, but instead, like every other potentially interesting thing in Mulan, they’re barely given more than a few lines of exposition, never enough depth or screen time to be made interesting. At primary fault here is a weak and non-cohesive screenplay. (To be cont.)