Let's say immediately that the live action remake of Mulan it's an unfortunate movie. The gestation process of this film dates back to the now distant 2010, but due to creative differences, production problems and so on and so forth, the project ended up falling into oblivion until 2015. went on to add another two years just to choose the director (Niki Caro) and the leading actress (Yifei Liu, chosen after a casting call of 1000 actresses). This is followed by long shootings of almost two years between China and New Zealand, with a budget of 200 million dollars (the highest ever for a film directed by a female director), marked by controversies and controversies related to Liu's support. for the Chinese government during the early stages of the Hong Kong protests that trigger the boycott of the film on social media.
This film doesn't have to be done
The film finally sees the light and dark of the theater in March 2020 for the Hollywood premiere, only to be suspended immediately due to the pandemic from Covid-19. Running for cover, Disney presents Mulan as an exclusive Disney + starting from 4 September 2020 with limited screenings in countries with open cinemas. If this isn't a clear example of development hell, I don't know what it could be. This live action remake of one of the most critically underrated titles of the disney renaissance runs more than one risk: it presents the beloved animated film in a new package, more faithful to the original legend and closer to Chinese wuxia cinema, underlining (and exacerbating, but we'll get there) the film's message of female and feminist self-determination. An appreciable challenge from more than one point of view, since, from the "Jungle Book" (2016) onwards, the live action remakes of the Disney classics (useless and wanted by no one, we would like to point out) have been decidedly forgettable. and mere carbon copies of the classic titles that made the fortune of the world's most famous production company.
Mulan features spectacular action scenes with excellent choreography, worthy of the most popular Chinese martial arts film titles. Furthermore, the production values are at the top of the category, a quality shared however with most of the live action titles of recent years. What is Mulan missing then? Well, basically everything else. An excellent visual department isn't enough to justify a patched-up story for good and better, poor character development and brain-dead dialogue. The growth of Mulan, the discovery of her place in the world beyond woman and mother is immediately sacrificed when the protagonist presents herself as an excellent fighter, throwing away the possibilities of growth and self-realization expressed in the original, especially in the training camp scenes: in creating a super-human character, Mulan is unpleasant in the broad sense of the term, that is, devoid of our sympathy, closer to a Marvel hero than to a multifaceted girl whose growth we follow. to see her become heroin.
This strategy plays, ironically, against the feminist subtext on which the director presses the pedal, transforming a girl to discover herself in a hostile world (male chauvinist) into a mythical heroine devoid of self-reflexive skills and qualities. Also the novelty of the film, the forced insertion of a villainess endowed with extraordinary powers played by an actress of the caliber of Gong Li, who also seemed very promising at the beginning of the film, ends up being sacrificed in a hurry to the logic of a feminist film for girls without being able to explode all its potential, except to present it as a tragic reflection of the protagonist. Disney takes a risk and presents a different live-action, consumed however by old problems, where the exaltation of female power suffocates everything else and ends up excluding the enormous possibilities of a remake whose original echo is still felt 20 years after.
