To remake a beloved movie is not simple task. To use another artform could prove to be even harder. Disney during the 2010's have been notorious in this practice, and the new live-action remakes are almost always weaker than their animated counter-parts. I therefore went into this movie with low expectations, yet that didn't help the movie in the slightest. It's almost astounding how much this movie tries and fails. The main story remains unchanged, but the sense of urgency and suspense is non-existent. The movie clearly tries to be a mix of 'Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon' and the original Mulan from 1998, yet it manages to fail at doing any of those styles right. Mulan is reduced from a brave, reckless and somewhat quirky girl who transforms into a great warrior from a normal, to a supernatural robot. She doesn't have a personality at all, and in this movie she is suddenly great at channeling her 'Chi'. This makes her triumphs feel meaningless, because we no longer get a sense that she has to work for anything. It also creates this weird scenario where the live-action remake, despite being marketed as more realistic than the original, loses all sense of grittiness and danger the animated version presented so expertly. Mulan is also damaged by a genuinly awful performance. She shows no emotion or engagement at all, and I tried to picture her current mindset several times, to no avail. The movie also tried to add some emotional depth with some new characters, but every single one of them felt uninspired and bland. Most of the characters from the original have been scrapped, and the ones we do get are forgettable and boring. The movie also suffers from trying to convey the same emotion the songs in the original did, despite not having any songs. This leads to some very awkward scenes where the characters just flail about, and suddenly they are masters at being soldiers. The cinematography is nothing special, and the landscapes doesn't feel immersive at all, which I feel like is the main reason for having them in the first place. The fight scenes are really poorly edited, and the large battle sequences doesn't have any sense of scale or importance like in the original. The movie also has severe pacing issues, which harms it even more. Usually I would end a review with a summary of the good parts of the movie, but honestly? I'm not even sure there are any here. The movie is a remake that takes everything good about the original out, reduces every existing character to boring cardboard figures, adds new and pointless characters and plotpoints that either doesn't add anything, or actively harms the movie. I genuinly cannot believe how much I hated this movie. If this is how remakes are meant to be, I wish that they be purged from this world immediately, and this movie in particular.
