We paid the 20 or so dollars for it when it first came out, to celebrate am awesome report card for my daughter. We all liked it a lot at the time.
I wish we had some ownership of if for those 20 dollars. Oh well.
I just read the “Step into Reading” book version of this movie to my daughter. I had never heard of it before and most of those readers are pretty crap but I thought to myself “This is a pretty cool story!” Too bad I’ve spoiled it for myself now. I’ll definitely take a look at this on Disney+.
Understandable, but it’s not like you get any ownership when you see a first run movie in the theatre, and it costs a lot more than $20 for a family.
Not where I live. Got to Get those half price matinee tickets, and sneak in food and drinks.
Also, the big screen is still different from the little screen so it’s not a one to one comparison.
We watched this with my kids, and while it was somewhat well received, it felt kind of…hollow? Or empty? There were a bunch of characters but I didn’t really care about most of them, and some potentially good interactions and complexity that never had a chance to get explored. Like, the whole thing about the evil queen’s motivations where she’s coded as a power hungry / greedy villain, but she says it’s for the good of her tribe, and then…that tension is never explored.
At the end I was mostly thinking “where did the last 2 hours go?” There weren’t many memorable action sequences, there wasn’t really any characterization, there weren’t songs…what was the runtime of the move made up of? Compared to something like Into the Spider verse, which had memorable action, hot tunes, and a bunch of endearing side characters…what were they even doing.
The action choreography like the night market chases was fine, but the actual fight choreography didn’t seem very inspired.
What a weird, unjustified deus ex machina. It didn’t even really fit the themes of the movie, but the movie spend too much time on ninja babies to really worry about themes.
I don’t know if it actually was rewritten a bunch of times, but this movie felt like it was rewritten a bunch. It felt like they were setting up things that never paid off, like that big finale thing you mentioned, but also what the Awkwafina’s dragon’s special power is.
She says she’s a good swimmer, which is the kind of setup you do when she has a power that she either doesn’t want to talk about, or, more to the point: that she herself doesn’t know about. That there’s a reason that she’s special, but that she always relied on her siblings because she’s the youngest and so never understood how important she really was. “Girl, you don’t know you’re beautiful” and all that.
Given her siblings all have water powers an obvious direction is that she’s the spirit of the river, and her life force is the river’s life force. This explains why she’s a good swimmer, but also explains why the river dries up when she dies, kind of. But, that’s never really made clear, and the whole de-stoning thing at the end muddies any attempt at a coherent magical narrative and I realized the movie didn’t care and so I shouldn’t either.
I didn’t hate it, and SEAsian representation is nice, but it just wasn’t especially good. People compared it to Avatar, but you, ma’am, are no Avatar.
Moana was better and was more uh filling.
Look it is hardly fair to compare any animated film to Moana, which I would argue as perhaps Disney Animations best movie.
Moana is a personal favorite for me as well.
I enjoyed Raya and the last Dragon, it was a solid B.
Also, yeah, Moana is absolute fire.
As someone from SEA (Vietnam) myself I agree completely.
That’s supposed to be a bad thing?
The good Avatar. Not the movie, or the other movie. The cartoon.
Oh, right.
I watched this over the last two weeks, and finally finished last night. I agree with all the above criticisms. It was entertaining in parts, and kind of cool in other parts, and funny in several parts, but overall it just didn’t really come together to be anything special. The overall message was pretty weird. I think if they really wanted to make a movie about trusting people, they could have written a much better story to actually carry that message.
Watched it and thought it was serviceably entertaining. Certainly can’t hold a candle to Moana though as others here already mentioned. Dug the setting, which is also down to anything not inspired by European fairytales feeling more fresh. Wish they had expanded the lore even further and spent some more time on world building.
The plot itself was overall formulaic and pretty much every beat of it seemed predictable. Did appreciate the lack of songs though. (What can I say - few exceptions aside, song sections in these movie usually just bore me.) With regards to the dragon design - when Sisu was together with her brothers and sisters, I got some My Little Pony vibes due to snouts and the colours. And the climax felt reminiscent of the one of Guardians of the Galaxy as the team–surrounded by purple stuff–realizes that they need to work together and the enfant terrible among them needs to bring it home with the magic stone.
Ha! I hadn’t thought of the GotG parallels, nice catch!