A spoiler-heavy movie review.
In Disney’s ongoing venture to remake every property they’ve ever produced so as to hold the new generation upside-down by their ankles and shake all the money out of their pockets, here we have “Mulan”. You know already whether this is something you are going to watch, whether that be for the THIRTY DOLLARS Disney is asking its Plus subscribers right now to pay for the privilege (which was my burden to carry, thank my wife and pandemic-fatigue), or waiting until December when it will be available to anyone who uses the service and still gives a shit. Let’s get this out of the way right now: the $30 price-tag is obviously an experiment with no reasonable grounding in reality. When was the last time you paid $30 to see a movie in theatres? Even in my neck-of-the-woods, Cineplex’s shaky-seat D-BOX format is only $25, and you get a two-hour massage out of it too. Yes, I understand it could be worth it if you held a twenty-person viewing party (and so everyone is only retroactively-paying $1.50), but then your bigmouth neighbors would call bylaw enforcement and you would have a social gathering fine to worry about (which we were told could be in the thousands, but obviously depends on where you live and who you know). If Disney is successful in getting enough of their subscribers to pay, then it will be a dark day for movies-on-film champions like Chris Nolan: you could be looking at a multi-billion-dollar enterprise cutting out struggling theatre chains with a pricier alternative. Know what else isn’t grounded in reality? Mulan 2020.
I know, you can’t really say that any of Disney’s animated films have even attempted to convey a semblance of reality, with talking forest animals and magic and happy endings being the norm. I knew from the trailers that there would be some theatrical and improbable high-flying kung-fu that has been popular in Chinese cinema since “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, but I really thought they would do something different with the property for its 2.0 update. As soon as Yifei Liu’s Mulan rode horseback through a sunny field with FOREST ANIMALS running beside her in the first 10-minutes of the movie, I knew the Disney formula would be alive-and-kicking for another twenty-years. This doesn’t mean Mulan 2020 wasn’t watchable and fast-paced (which it was): it’s just uninspired and echoic.
What’s the plot? Do you care? Have you no children, who’ve seen the original a million times from the old bubble-packaged VHS that’s so degraded from use it has to track all the way through? Were you not once a child yourself? Our heroine Mulan is a country girl with a big secret: she’s a warrior in-training, thanks to her soldiery father and a naturally-occurring spiritual protein supplement in her known as “chi”. Unfortunately, she is also a woman in a time before suffrage. When the Emperor’s kingdom is threatened and he decrees that one man from each family should fight, Mulan would rather pretend she’s a boy than let her ailing father go to war, and so that’s what she does. Gallantry ensues. Along the way there are some highly-suggested homoerotic undertones (when in-actuality all the men are lusting over a woman in-disguise, if only they knew); “Ip Man”‘s Donnie Yen as a Commander who breaks-up sword fights by literally kicking the swords mid-clash; and Hannibal Lecter’s foster mother Gong Li (from “Hannibal Rising” and “Memoirs of a Geisha”) as a witch with an identity crisis. Really, the acting is fine all-around, and Li’s icy-cold delivery is a treat I’ll always indulge, but I recalled Roger Ebert’s review for Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Chrismas Mr. Lawrence” where he points out the discrepancies between Asian and English-styles of acting. His argument was that British acting leans towards a method of subtlety while the Japanese – in “Lawrence” – lean on histrionics, and it’s jarring to see both styles portrayed in the same scene: it draws attention to itself, something that isn’t associated with “acting”, period. Same here with an international cast forced to read from an English-language script. While everyone does their best (including some good banter from Mulan’s fumbling “make-a-man-out-of-you” army friends), there was still an apathetic wall between the characters and myself that I couldn’t surmount: everyone is so forlorn and serious that even the comedy bits are played as precursors to death. Is this something that could have been rectified had the film been presented in Chinese with subtitles instead of in English? Yes, that would limit its financial outlook, but it’s possible everyone would have been a bit more comfortable and not so disparaging, then. Can you imagine a live-action Mulan as directed by Ang Lee? But then you wouldn’t have the gender-equality vote (which was in-trend when Caro was hired). And I’m sure Ang Lee doesn’t put up with creative interference: it takes two to tango in the big leagues.
But it doesn’t really matter, because Mulan 2020 is pure fantasy. Allow me to share a discovery: Mulan is actually a Jedi. Think about it. Putting aside the legend of the real Hua Mulan (on whom the story is based), in the original animated film there was no mention that she got her badass skills from anything other than relentless training and feminine fortitude. In Mulan 2020, her power is explained via her “chi”, which “flows through all living things”. Excuse me? Is “chi” like midichlorians, then? Why is it so important that she keep her “chi” to herself? Isn’t that a huge leap for women’s rights? And then there’s a whole scene where Mulan is prepared to confess her womanliness to the Commander, and he suddenly turns all Ben Kenobi and toots her force-horn. Wasn’t the point of these Princess movies that ANY little girl could be who they wanted if they believed in themselves? But wait, they weren’t: Snow White found salvation in the Seven Dwarves; Cinderella’s deliverance came at the hands of a Fairy Godmother; Belle had an entire wait-staff help her court the Beast, et al. There has always been something supernatural in the wings of these stories and movies, helping our heroines along. And now, in the modern age, you apparently need a blood test before you can even think about becoming a doctor or a firefighter, and it ain’t just for drugs. Why Disney feels the need to shoehorn “Star Wars” stuff into Mulan other than to attract new money is beyond me: it’s not like their writers can’t come up with other, veritable enchantment. It’s part of their mandate! Consider the addition of that phoenix that follows Mulan around. JUST WHAT IS THE PHOENIX’S NAME, DISNEY? Despite it having less than two-minutes worth of screentime in the two-hour film and no real point for being there other than the cultural-appropriation, it proves their writer’s room can come up with “magical bullshit” which doesn’t have roots in a galaxy far, far away. I couldn’t help thinking what Disney could have done with Mulan 2020 if it was a realistic take, presented with subtitles and no hocus-pocus. Maybe even a less watered-down version of the original legend? Then they could have left whatever mythology they wanted intact, instead of fighting with the stanchness that live-action brings by-nature. You can’t say they didn’t have the opportunity, because they did. Instead, we have another from the House of Mouse assembly-line: expertly-biro’d and on-trend, but devoid of substance, derivative, and overpriced. My wife put it best: “It’s a little-girls movie with action for the boys.” Ditto.
//jf 9.12.2020
Poster sourced from collider.com.
theory of a daskeman 