Marianne

This movie had so much potential. By the time I watched it, however, I'd read some reviews that left my expectations quite low. It failed to live up to those low expectations. Here are a few of my main issues: 1) Ham-handed and botched feminist messaging. Someone who considers a woman's powers "gifts," will not tell her to hide them--terrible dialogue to the contrary. Also, after finishing the film it failed to even have a meaningful/helpful feminist message. A meaningful message would be "women are capable." The actual message was: "don't repress women if they have amazing mystical powers. If not, repress away!" If you are going to use heavy-handed feminist narratives (and my advice is, don't--nobody wants a preachy film) at least make the narrative underlying it worthwhile. 2) Moody, unmotivated Mulan. It took me a while to figure out her motivation, even though she has only one: bring honor to the family. It took a while because she is so bad at it, and so prone to stopping her quest to be moody and melodramatic. Along the way, she tended to snap at people being friendly to her, prefer death to dishonor, pause dramatically--repeatedly--to experience all the feels while she was supposed to be hurrying to rescue someone who's life was in immediate peril, refuse important promotions, etc. Ugh. Even fairly novice storywriters know that having a main character who's motivation is difficult to discern, and whose personality is . . . off . . . is storytelling poison. How did Disney get this one so wrong? 3) Atrocious fight scenes. Long strips of linen are apparently deadly weapons. People can run straight up walls. Just about everyone important can catch arrows (until the movie-maker wants to kill a character specifically, anyway--then the power is gone). The fights were way too fake-y to be enjoyable. Maybe they didn't want it to feel too realistic, for the kids? But it didn't feel like a kid's movie in other respects, so why bother? There were a couple of good things. The landscapes were lovely. The cinematography was stunning. Many of the sets were quite charming. It had some great shots of people galloping horses to the rescue. Thus, two stars. Overall, it kind of felt like this movie blew its whole enormous budget on sets and setting and had to use a washed out B-movie writer for plot and dialogue with the few dollars that remained.