Moana

Disney's live-action redo of the 2016 animated hit, directed by Thomas Kail (the Hamilton stage guy, making his second feature) from a script by Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller. Catherine Laga'aia debuts as Moana, the chief's daughter pulled toward the ocean her village won't cross. Dwayne Johnson is back as Maui, the demigod with the fish hook, and Jemaine Clement returns as Tamatoa, the giant crab with taste issues. Rena Owen, John Tui, and Frankie Adams fill out Motunui. The first act is the one you remember: island, grandmother, calling to the sea, and a reef nobody's supposed to sail past. Same beats. Real actors this time.

Catherine Laga'aia is genuinely good. She's a real screen presence in a role that could've easily been a karaoke performance, and she sings the Lin-Manuel Miranda material without straining for the animated version's phrasing. There's a new Miranda song written for the film, and it lands. The physical staging of Maui and Moana bickering across a canoe plays better with human faces than you'd expect. Kail knows how to shoot performers — that's what he does — and the two-hander scenes work. Jemaine Clement is still funny. The wardrobe and hair departments clearly gave a damn. If you have small kids who wore out the 2016 disc, they'll be delighted, which is why CinemaScore audiences gave it an A-minus while critics parked it at 35%.

The backdrops. So many scenes are visibly staged against soundstage compositing that the ocean, which is the whole point, looks like a screensaver behind the actors. Kail comes from theater and it shows — blocking is clean, camera is timid. The script is the 2016 movie retyped. Beat-for-beat, joke-for-joke, song-for-song. Johnson is coasting on charisma he's used before and knows works. And the whole thing cost $250 million to make a version that's less expressive than the cartoon it's copying. It opened to $43 million domestic. That's a burn.

Parents with kids under ten who want a two-hour babysitter in a nice theater. Fans of the songs who want to hear them sung by people. If you liked the live-action Lion King's exact-copy strategy, you'll accept this one. Everyone else — anyone who remembers the animated film had actual visual invention, anyone allergic to the Disney remake factory, anyone hoping Kail would do something Hamilton-weird with a musical — should bounce by the reef.

SLOP because it's a $250 million photocopy. The craft failure is specific: a director whose gift is staging live performance stuck shooting against dead green-screen oceans, a script that refuses to justify its own existence with a single new idea, and a production that mistook faithfulness for a substitute for reason. Laga'aia deserves a better movie. Miranda's new song deserves a better movie. Even Johnson, phoning it in, deserves a better movie. The animated Moana was made by people who had something to draw; this one was made by people who had a spreadsheet. Skip it, put the original on, save the popcorn money.