Mulan (Yifei Liu) was born to be a warrior in a time where doing so marked her as a witch, as unnatural. Her father (Tzi Ma) cautions her to hide her gifts, but when he is conscripted into the Imperial Army to fight the incursions of Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and his shapeshifting witch (Gong Li), Mulan secretly takes his place. Disguised as a man, she can finally shine as the martial artist she is meant to be and wins the acclaim of her commanders and fellow soldiers. But as the invaders threaten the Empire, Mulan's secret is a much more immediate threat to her life.
I will try and focus on the positive aspects first. The cinematography and set design are beautiful. The costumes are gorgeous. The whole cast is Asian and it was directed by a woman, so hooray for representation. They got her name right, Hua Mulan, not Fa. The Rouran Khaganate is also more historically accurate than the Huns. The wuxia is top-notch. The horse stuntwork is great.
Yay, positive things! Now we're going to divide the criticism into two parts: what I didn't like about the movie itself and its comparison to the 1998 animated film.
Let's start with the latter. It's not a musical, which is actually okay. I don't mind that.
No Mushu. Instead, her family totem is a phoenix. Disappointing, but only the Emperor and his family were allowed to have dragons, so that at least makes sense.
No Li Shang. That was more of a bummer for me, but it does remove the fraternization and any possibility of a power imbalance between Mulan and a love interest, replaced here by just a fellow soldier (Yoson An).
Lucky Cricket is a dude now (Jun Yu). Okay? I guess?
No sassy Grandma. No comedic relief at all.
They clearly tried to shoehorn as many scenes from the animated film into the live-action as they could but they don't work as well. The avalanche scene was fucking perfect in the animated but kind of a head-scratcher in the live action. *MINOR SPOILERS* Like, she had time to gather helmets, ride ten miles behind the enemy, set up dummy soldiers, and get into position close enough to shoot arrows at the Rourans, betting they would turn their whole-asss trebuchet around and set off an avalanche, before they destroyed all the remaining Imperial soldiers? Also, they could hit turtleshell shield groups of soldiers but completely fucking overshot the foothills? *END SPOILERS*
The movie itself honestly feels dumbed down. The dialogue is over-explained and interactions between characters seem very wooden. My biggest pet peeve here is how Chi is used. It's the goddamn midicholorians all over again. She can't just have a passion and natural talent honed by endless practice, no she has Magic in her Blood. It's reductive and insulting. Which brings us to the other Magical Girl in the film. Now, Chinese folklore is absolutely rife with magic so I don't mind that it was included. My issue is how the writers (four white people) chose to portray this character as ridiculously overpowered yet submissive, bitter but yearning, and frankly misused in the third act. We as viewers are meant to think this is dark mirror of Mulan, all unchecked power and ostracized for displaying it openly and maybe if they were more similar, if "the witch" was just really, really good at combat and not able to turn into a flock of birds or shapeshift into other people (which also makes no sense for her character because why doesn't she just...turn into Böri Khan and take over the whole damn thing?), her "we're the same, you and I" speech would be more resonant. Instead, it just falls flat.
And that's really the problem with the whole film. It's not trying to be a new, more representative, more accurate version of the Chinese hero. It's trying to be a grownup version of the animated film and there's no reason for that to be a thing. That just makes it sad.
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