Mulan is Disney’s latest live-action remake of an animated classic and is one of two tent-pole movies recently released at cinemas (the other being Tenet), and in the case of Mulan, Disney+. Since I wanted to save myself from an Inception-sized headache, I opted to watch the remake instead.
Having being brought up watching a lot of kungfu/wuxia movies, I thought the trailer for the Niki Caro-directed movie was trying to tap on the vein of epic wuxia movies, so yeah, expectations were high with this one.
It’s a classic hero’s journey form of story-telling. Mulan kicks off where as a child, she comes across as rambunctious kid with a talent for chasing chickens and has parents who are struggling to temper their child’s talents. Fast forward to adulthood, due to the threat of Rouran warriors and the mobilization of the Imperial Army, Mulan takes her father’s place to enlist while disguising her gender.
There are obviously fights, battles and bit of banter to watch, but my first thought after watching the film was that it was underwhelming. Everything seemed pretty scaled down, the fights were too little and had no blood despite the body count (they could have done something ala 300 where the Spartans encountered the dead while on the way to the Hot Gates) and the characters were rather dull/dour, with Gong Li’s character being particularly wasted.
There’s also the bit where the film went out the way to explain why Mulan (the character) was so good at what she does. The film’s writers did what George Lucas did to Anakin Skywalker in the Phantom Menace, giving Mulan the Chinese version of midi-chlorians: Chi.
But after stepping back and putting myself in a hypothetical scenario of narrating the film to a child, let’s say my eldest daughter, I would say that Mulan is Wuxia-lite, a wuxia film, one that was made to appeal to children as the scale is kinda like Happy Meal-sized.
But do you know what’s a better option out there if you are looking out for a wuxia movie that would appeal to both adults and children, and wouldn’t try to patronize either age group that much? It would be Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda and its sequels.
As it stands, Mulan seems to be neither here or there, and in terms of the recent Disney remakes that I’ve watched which includes live-action numbers Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Maleficent (a spin-off from Sleeping Beauty) and Mulan, and the photo-realistic CGI fest The Lion King… my vote still goes with Aladdin and Maleficent. It seems like Disney might have missed an opportunity with this one. Mulan gets a 3 out of 5.
