Mulan rise of a warrior rotten tomatoes
So, onto the thing that probably killed me the most with this movie: character development. The costuming and cinematography a feat, made to create art with each still. It made the two-hour run time feel endless, even when every visual was stunning.
#Mulan rise of a warrior rotten tomatoes movie#
That is what this movie was missing, the pieces that kept me interested when the main plot hit a lull. It creates a more dynamic plot with more moving pieces, and those other characters allowed for subplots, subplots which kept the movie interesting when the main plot hit a lull.
Layered into that is Mushu and Cri-kee representing the elements of the ancestors and fortune. To break it down further, in the animated film we get invested in lives outside of Mulan, in each of the men she bonds with, Chien Po, Ling, and Shang for example, these men are each allowed to be characters in their own right, with developed backstories and thorough motivations. The plot in this film, in fact, is fairly one dimensional. The plot of Mulan was familiar enough, a daughter takes her father’s place in the Chinese army in order to save his life and becomes one of the ‘greatest warriors China has ever known.’ In the original, we also saw the struggle of the ancestors with accepting Mulan, Mulan finding her place among the other soldiers, and the soldiers coming to terms with the harsh reality of war, a moment hammered home by the sharp tonal contrast at the end of “A Girl Worth Fighting For” when the battalion comes across the burned village. In this review I’ll take apart in detail the shortcomings I saw in plotting, character, and overall development in the film. They shifted the focus to creating a more authentic narrative that would appeal to a Chinese market, but in taking so much away they forgot to give anything back.
I knew that this movie had opted to take a more serious route, stripping away the music and most of the comedic elements, including our favorite animal sidekicks (Pour one out for Mushu and Cri-Kee), but I didn’t anticipate just how much they would take from the movie. Maybe it fell a bit below Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid, but it still played frequently in my house, and I knew every song by heart. New characters seek to add depth but without the time and attention to character and story needed for this film to succeed it falls flat and seems to drag through the two hours, focusing more on how pretty it is than the substance of the film. Despite this movie being visually stunning and following a beloved movie heroine, the plot falls extremely flat by cutting out the humor, music, and subplots from the animated films.