Review: Mulan (2020) (Special Viewing)

Hello fellow Disnerds! We finally sat down to watch the live-action remake of Mulan. Although this was released in September, we chose to wait until after its December 4th release on Disney Plus (we didn’t feel like paying a premium fee when we already pay for the service). Anyway, we wanted to share some of our thoughts with you all down below. We’ll try to avoid spoilers even though the movie has been out for a while; we’ll share our detailed thoughts when we catch up with our calendar… a few years from now!

A Quick Review of Mulan

Kevin’s Thoughts

So far, none of Disney’s live-action remakes of their animated films have been outstanding. Some are better than others, and some are just disappointing. So, I was a little apprehensive about this one. I did not think this was as bad as it seemed many others thought. However, it was not really a “good” movie. At most, it’s passable. The visuals were beautiful and the set pieces were done well. I also think the actors all did great jobs.
The downsides are the action (so bad that I couldn’t suspend disbelief) and that the movie still played out almost beat for beat to the animated film. By contrast, the lack of music was actually a bit of a highlight to me here. I didn’t need the same songs I heard before, and I think it actually would have taken away from the film. This is also how I feel about not including Shang or Mushu. Not every remake needs to be the same as its source material, and honestly I really don’t think it should be.
I could see this going down as one of the more forgettable Disney remakes. Overall, it has good moments and not-so-good ones, but I was not blown away by it. I would need to give it another go at some point to see if my thoughts change.

Megan’s Thoughts

What was everyone complaining about? I’ll admit, I walked into this one setting my expectations real low given the mixed reviews I’d heard from friends, and honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Sure, if you’re going into this thinking it’s going to be just like the animated Mulan, you’re going to be disappointed, but if you take this film as its own separate thing then you can appreciate the small nods to the animated version. Do I still like the animated version better? Absolutely. But I wouldn’t completely write off the live action remake just yet. It’s still way better than the trainwreck that was Mulan II!
For a girl-power movie, I was left wanting just a little bit more. Don’t get me wrong—the addition of Mulan’s sister and a female villain did help this pass the Bechdel test, and they added a bit more depth to the female world in contrast to the male, military world that takes up most of the story. While I liked seeing the alternate path the female villain offered, (without spoiling anything) the end of the female villain’s story left my inner feminist annoyed. I know it’s hard to get more females into the second act of the film given the time period and the severe consequences for women joining the army, but even so, I wanted to see more women in there for Mulan to interact with.
I have to second Kevin on the action sequences. In so many scenes it just looks…fake. I mean, I get it, it’s a movie—it is fake—but I’ve seen quite a number of super hero movies that make the action sequences more believable. In the beginning when it was kid-Mulan doing the action stunts I was willing to give it a pass—you can’t expect kid actors to be as physically skilled as adult actors, and there’s probably limits to what is possible for safety reasons. However, when even the adult actors’ action stunts looked fake I was completely taken out of the story and distracted by how a particular stunt was most likely achieved by the actor being suspended in some sort of harness.