In the penultimate episode of Disney’s new show The Acolyte, in theory a “star wars” show, we finally get the big reveal… that the witches were slightly more evil than we were shown in episode 3. Also, the Jedi were telling the truth when they said they thought the planet was uninhabited??? I discuss the morality presented and how this episode that only makes the witches look worse was supposed to make the Jedi look bad.
Tag: Disney
The Acolyte Episode 6: Killing Time
Episode 6 is half about the nameless sith (credited as Qimir for some reason) trying to seduce Osha to the dark side of the Force and half about killing time. There’s also an intolerable space rodent named Basil.
Disney’s The Acolyte Episode 5
In this episode we look at the big light saber battle, the reveal of who Mae’s master is, various ideas of what the Jedi aren’t allowed to do in combat and why that misunderstands the nature of honor in combat, and other things.
Other episode reviews:
Disney’s The Acolyte Episode 4: Walking Through a Forest
A look at Disney’s “Star Wars” show The Acolyte. Episode 4. Where everyone is walking through a forest for most of the episode. Well, the “good” parts, at least. On the plus side, not much happening makes for a shorter review!
Previous reviews:
Why Watch The Acolyte
I was recently asked by a friend why I watch Disney’s new “Star Wars” show The Acolyte. Owning, as I do, over $1000 work of Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD box sets, part of it is that I enjoy laughing at bad movies (and movie-like TV shows). That’s a big part of it, though The Acolyte is very slowly paced, which makes it a lot less fun in that way than, say, The Least Jedi.
Another part of it is that there are things you can learn from bad art which you can’t learn from great art. Great art speaks to the human condition; it is universal and therefore transcends its time. Bad art is mired in its own time. Therefore, if you wish to understand a time period, you should look at, not the great art from that time period, but the bad art from it.
And I am curious to try to understand the kind of people who make The Acolyte. There is a sense in which Grand Admiral Thrawn is correct: if you want to understand a people, study their art.
The Acolyte Episode 3
In this video I look at the most infamous episode (so far!) of Disney’s new “Star Wars” series, The Acolyte. It’s bad, but it’s not straightforwardly bad, and we’re looking at the strange way in which it’s bad.
Bad Writing Doesn’t Work With Mystery Plots
For some odd reason I decided to watch Disney’s new show, The Acolyte. I guess all the buzz about how bad it is got me intrigued. And it’s bad, to be sure. It’s not all that fun, though, since it’s very slow. Each episode could have five to ten minutes trimmed from it without removing any plot points, dialog, or important reaction shots. Which is not to say that they wouldn’t benefit considerably from trimming some of that, too. The episodes are about forty minutes long and with decent editing for pace, I think they could easily be twenty five minutes long without feeling rushed. Which would make enjoying the badness a lot more fun.
Anyway, the point I wanted to get to is that The Acolyte is, at its core, a mystery. It’s not detective fiction; it’s more like a suspense thriller—you don’t know who the good guys are or who the main character can trust. Everyone has a story, we only know parts of them, and we don’t know if any of these stories are true.
Now, when this kind of thing is done well, the fun is that you start to figure out who you can trust because there become cracks in the stories of the people you can’t trust. Things they say or do don’t quite fit in and though they have explanations, the explanations don’t quite fit.
Frankly, I think it’s quite rare for this sort of thing to be done well because it’s very hard to pull off. But what really doesn’t work in this genre is having gaping plot holes early on. For example, having a fire break out in the vacuum of space which gets put out by smothering it with a fire extinguisher. Later on, when a stone building catches fire like it’s made of paper soaked in gasoline, you can’t say, “That couldn’t have come from the fire Mae started because there was no way for it to spread so quickly in a stone building. It must have been the Jedi and they used Mae happening to set fire to a book as a cover!” You can’t say this because the idiots who wrote a scene with metal catching fire in the vacuum of space easily might not realize that stone doesn’t catch fire as readily as paper soaked in gasoline. Then again, for all we know, they did and the pointless scene of the metal-on-fire-in-outer-space was meant to prepare us to accept stone catching fire.
I think that the way you’re supposed to watch this kind of show (that is, what the makers of it hope you will do) is to turn off the rational part of your brain and just feel whatever the music and acting is telling you to feel in the moment with no reference to having seen anything before. Which really doesn’t fit into the suspense thriller genre, in which the primary pleasure (outside of the frequent action scenes, which The Acolyte is sparse on) is intellectual.
This also makes guessing the identity of the sith master (or whatever he’s supposed to be that’s t he obvious equivalent of the sith) no fun. My best guesses—based on the psychology of the writers so far, not the plot—is either master Vernestra, mother Kora, mother Aniseya, or someone we haven’t met yet. I think that the fourth episode is trying to set us up to believe it’s Qimir (the character that Critical Drinker refers to as “discount Ezra Miller”), which means that it’s almost certainly not him because it’s too early for it to be him. Now, in a well-written show, you could consider various bits of evidence presented within the episodes. In this show, that would be a waste of time because anything that you see could easily just be the writers being incompetent. And even my guesses about who the sith is are based on the assumption that a character being in the same scene as the sith means that they definitely can’t be the sith. For all I know, that’s not true and master Sol or Yorg is the sith.
This is one thing that, for all its flaws, I have to give The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson never wrote anything that depended on you remembering anything else he wrote or thinking that it made sense.
The Star Wars Hotel
Jenny Nicholson has an interesting 4-hour video on the Star Wars hotel (officially, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser):
It’s an interesting and entertaining video on the rise and fall of Disney World’s star wars hotel. If you’re in the mood for that kind of thing, I recommend it. If this is too long for you, the tl;dw is that the Hotel opened in spring of 2022 as a Star Wars sequel trilogy themed LARP hotel where there’s a running story with actors who sometimes walk around the “ship” and you, in theory, get to take part in the story. It seems like the taking part in the story is mostly theoretical, much of it being done with dialog trees on an app where characters are texting you, and after a few successful months interest faded quickly and the hotel was shut down permanently in the fall of 2023.
I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the thing.
Galactic Starcruiser looks very much like an idea which was going to be super cool and somewhere about three quarters of the way through implementation Disney realized that they couldn’t do it, and so scrambled to come up with something that could plausibly be considered a version of what they promised. They had wanted an interactive story, and that is doable if you have something like a 3:1 ratio of actors to guests. That would be expensive, but Galactic Starcruiser was. It was roughly $3000 per person for two days and two nights; that’s inclusive of food but still in the right ballpark to pay for a 3:1 ratio of actors to guests.
But for whatever reason, they didn’t go that route. Maybe they ran afoul of occupancy limits, maybe they couldn’t reliably hire enough actors. Whatever the reason, they ended up going more in the direction of a 1:20 actors to guests ratio. At that kind of ratio, it’s not possible to have any kind of interactive story where most guests are more than just extras. “Come pay a lot of money to be an extra in a star wars story that only you see” is not really a promise of “live out your star wars story,” so they had to come up with something. Enter the app.
Disney World has an app for using the parks and this was extended with gameplay for Galactic Starcruiser. Human beings can’t meaningfully interact in a dramatic way with 200 people, but a computer can. Well, not meaningfully, but it can interact with them, anyway. And so all of the interactions which had consequences consisted of texting back and forth with characters in the app going along dialog trees and doing miscellaneous activities which can be supported on a pre-existing phone app such as scanning QR codes on crates, ostensibly to help the characters you’re texting with. Of course, since the actors aren’t going to do anything differently based on how around 200 people interacted with an app, the consequences of these actions were mostly limited to scheduling you to appear at various scenes that would happen throughout the “ship” at different times. The actors’ dialog would be set up to be as compatible as possible with people thinking that their actions had affected the story, but that can’t be very much, at least for people over 8 years old.
Curiously, Disney didn’t even really commit to this approach. Most of your immersive experience being on a screen isn’t wonderful, but they didn’t even give you an exotic screen from the hotel. They just had you use your own phone. So you spent $3000 to go to a hotel where much of your time was taken up staring at your phone. I like my phone but I don’t go on vacation to spend more time with it.
It would have been easy enough to provide the guests with tablets that had star-wars themed cases (that beige metal with rounded corners which screams Star Wars, for example). That wouldn’t be a huge improvement, but it would have been an improvement and would have given guests something in their hands which is in-character and special.
It also wouldn’t have been that hard to make a recombining branching storyline. You can’t make it branch based on individual actions, but you could based on cumulative actions. For example, you could have guests on the First Order side look for hidden contraband, and depending on how much they find the resistance would smuggle some or most through, and the characters may have to do something different if it’s only most of the contraband. You’d still go to the next major story beat no matter what, but how you get there would be different and people would feel that they contributed to the outcome, much in the way that individual soldiers contribute to victory in a battle.
I find it weird that Disney did none of this nor anything like it, and relied on generic, ambiguous dialog to allow people to persuade themselves that they did something if they’re inclined to do that.
This weird course change also explains some of the really strange things, like how the hotel was quite small and everyone was expected to play the game that existed. This is an absurd design, since with a 1:20 actor-to-guest ratio it’s necessarily not a good game. It would have made far more sense to have a much larger hotel, with more things to do such as a pool, an arcade, etc. which cost a lot less and participation in the actor-driven game was a significant up-charge. That would make the cost structure far more bearable, make the actor-to-playing-guest ratio much better, and also make it more fun since there would be people watching the people who paid extra. And the people watching wouldn’t feel left out because they know that the people who are participating in the storyline paid like three times what they did for their stay. Plus most people don’t actually want to LARP anyway. If I, for example, was forced to stay at a hotel like this, I’d pay an upcharge for some kind of badge to wear which made the actors leave me alone.
There’s another really curious issue: did anyone like the sequel trilogy well enough to spend money to have a vacation themed with it? (The fact that the hotel closed does suggest an answer is no.)
I have a hard time believing that anyone could, or that at any time the answer could plausibly have been yes. This isn’t just about the sequel trilogy having been really bad. I mean, that certainly didn’t help, but apart from that the sequel trilogy wasn’t even coherent.
I haven’t seen The Force Awakens but plot synopses make it clear that the main driver of its plot is the search for the map left by Luke Skywalker in case the galaxy should need him. The Last Jedi simply throws this out. Luke Skywalker is a depressed old loser, the Jedi are terrible and should die out, etc. Love it or hate it (and there’s something wrong with you if you love it), this story simply doesn’t go with the first one. Worse, by the end of the film it is clearly established that there is no hope left in the galaxy and the Resistance has been so destroyed that it now fits on a single small ship. If you like this tale of incompetence and defeat, I don’t see how you can also like The Force Awakens, which is a hopeful story about main characters who are at least competent and striving to make the world a better place with some success. Yes, it is normal for the second movie in a trilogy to be a setback for the heroes, but not for it to be a complete defeat, due in no small part to their radical incompetence. Those are just dissonant, unless you pay no attention.
Then we come to The Rise of Skywalker, which again throws out a bunch of stuff from the second movie. Luke Skywalker straight-up says that he was wrong about stuff he said in The Last Jedi, and the galaxy is established to not be hopeless, and the good guys win through gumption, courage, and competence. Oh, and while the second movie claimed that Rey was no one—gutter trash whose parents sold her for drinking money—The Rise of Skywalker establishes her as the granddaughter of the Emperor. Again, this is just dissonant with the second movie. It also has minimal continuity with The Force Awakens, though I am on shakier ground, there, since I didn’t see the first one and only read detailed plot synopses. There is the redemption of Kylo Ren, so admittedly that is one through-line in the two movies. Turning Rey into a Palpatine is absurd and quite at odds with the first movie, but then so is Palpatine being alive. Again, these movies don’t really go together unless you pay no attention.
And the problem that I see, when it comes to marketing, is that people who don’t notice that movies don’t go together because they pay no attention don’t seem like a promising place to look for people who want to pay $3000 for a two-day vacation filled with stuff related to these movies.
The timing of the hotel with the movies is also a bit odd. They want Kylo Ren, and they want him in his Darth Vader knockoff mask because that makes casting easier, so they are forced to set the hotel inbetween the first and second movie. Except they can’t do that, because there was only about a day between the first and second movie and they also want Rey and she was off on Achtung at the end of the first movie. And Kylo had destroyed his mask halfway through the second movie and was dead by the end of the third movie, and had only rebuilt it for a little while during the third movie. So really, there’s no plausible time to have set Galactic Starcruiser. Now, this fits in with people who pay no attention and don’t care about details, but again that seems an unlikely place to look for people who will want to pay $3000 for a two-day “immersive” experience. What’s the point of immersion if you’re not going to pay any attention to it? Why pay $3000 for something you don’t intend to remember?
It would have been different had the movies been good, or even if they were just coherent with each other. I’m not in the target market for this, so I can’t draw on my own intuitions, but I can at least imagine someone who loves a trilogy of movies spending a lot of money for a day or two of pretending that he’s in them. But other than that one who who did the trailer reaction where he was crying at the beauty of everything equally causing many people to question his manhood and most people to question his sanity, I can’t imagine someone loving these movies. They just don’t cohere enough for that to be possible.
And given the spectacular failure of Galactic Cruiser, I guess I’m not going out on much of a limb.
The Rise of Skywalker: Initial Thoughts
My oldest son is hoping that, having finally seen Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, I will write a review of it that is similarly long and humorously criticial as my review of episode 8: The Least Jedi. (He’s had me read it to him several times now, as he enjoys my performance of it.) I’m not sure that I can, though.
The reason why is that I’m not sure that TRoS was serious. And there’s no humor in pointing out the way that a joke doesn’t work as a serious story: that’s just not getting the joke.
TRoS was in an essentially impossible position, coming, as it did, after The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi was not merely a bad movie, but it was a mean-spirited and evil movie. It tried hard to sell the viewer that nobility and virtue are bad, that nothing means anything, and that life isn’t worth living. It ended with the resistance being down to a few dozen people and it being authoritatively established that the entire galaxy is now hopeless and unwilling to fight the First Order. There’s nowhere good to go from there.
I am reminded of an episode in the TV show Sports Night where the main characters (who are sports commentators on a small sports TV show) won the right to cover a very popular and much-anticipated boxing match, and had hours of coverage blocked out. Then one fighter knocks the other out with one lucky punch seven seconds into the first round. A bit later as they’re joking about how they’re going to cover the match nanosecond by nanosecond, the director complains to the producer that they’re turning it into a joke, and he replies, “Where else are they going to go with it?”
That same question applies to TRoS, and it feels like J.J. Abrams knew it and decided to embrace it. Yes, there was no plausible way that Palpatine could have come back, but there was no plausible way that anything interesting would happen, so he didn’t bother trying to make it plausible. Was Palpatine being back good? Hell no. But J.J. established it in the first few minutes, hung a lampshade on it, and at that point, I guess you might as well go with it. Did it make sense that planet Spaceball wanted to steal Druidia’s air rather than install some air filters? No, but they established it in the first few minutes and it’s not like suspension of disbelief was ever a goal. President Skroob breathed Perry-air from a can. You knew where you stood with Space Balls. And when Palpatine uses the force to lift thousands of star destroyers with death star canons on their bellies out of the ground and into the air, you basically know where you stand, here, too. And if you didn’t, you sure do when Kylo Ren has his mask rebuilt and the actor playing the guy doing the welding is a chimpanzee.
So, yes, the plot is filled with plot holes. Nothing is ever justified (unless you want to count “Palpatine did it for his own complex and sinister reasons”). But at some point, when there are enough plot holes, it’s time to consider the thing as lace. And, as a lace doily under the lamp to keep it from scratching the table, it kind of works.
And here’s where we get to possibly the biggest reason I don’t know if I can make fun of it: its heart was mostly in the right place. Sure, the adventures made no sense, Rey got even more force powers for no reason, most of the time death is now a minor inconvenience, as are things that should cause death, and characters become loyal to our main characters just because they’re there. But all of this nonsense is in service of giving the main characters heroic adventures, personalities, and character arcs. With the exception of General Hux, all of the long-term characters are given good send-offs, including Luke. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t consider the sequel trilogy as being actually related to the original trilogy. But J.J. Abrams seems to have considered them related and he tried to do good by them. That’s not something I want to make fun of.
Frozen is a Surprisingly Christian Movie
My four year old daughter was lent a DVD of the Disney movie Frozen, and in consequence I’ve seen it about a dozen times (so far). It really surprised me just how Christian the movie actually is, especially because it’s almost certain that was not intentional.
I’m going to run through the main plot elements to show what I mean.
The plot begins with two princesses, Anna and her older sister Elsa, playing at night. Elsa has the magic power to create ice is various forms, both solid and snow. Right away, there is an interesting sort of contradiction contained in this power, since on the one hand cold is negative—the absence of heat—and on the other hand she is able to create water, though frozen, from nothing. She has the power to create, but in a very limited way.
Now, normally when a female character has some sort of power, it tends to be a symbol for that great feminine power—fertility. You can generally see this because in the typical case everyone loves her for it (except for other women who are jealous, of course). That is not the case, here. Her ice powers work much better as a symbol of intellectual power and as we will see later, like intellectual powers her ice power isolates her from people.
As the children are playing with the snow Elsa creates, she slips and accidentally hits her sister in the head with a blast of ice, freezing her head. Anna lays comatose and cold as ice, and Elsa calls out to her parents for help. They come and take the children to the trolls, who as magical creatures can deal with magic. The chief troll tells the King that it is fortunate that she was not hit in her heart:
You are lucky it wasn’t her heart. The heart is not so easily changed. But the head can be persuaded.
Here, we really see the symbolism of Elsa’s power almost explicitly. She has the ability to affect the heart and the head. Of the two, it is more fortunate to be injured in the head, because the head can be more easily changed. This is quite correct. Purely intellectual errors can be fixed relatively easily, and even somewhat adversarially. By forcing a man who holds an idea merely as an idea to defend it, one can force him to realize that it is indefensible. Rarely, it is true, will he admit it in the heat of argument, but if it was purely an intellectual attachment to the idea, it will happen soon afterwards, when he has had time to think it through. To change his heart, he must repent.
The chief troll gives Elsa a warning:
Listen to me, Elsa. Your power will only grow. There is beauty in it but also great danger. You must learn to control it. Fear will be your enemy.
While giving this warning he conjures up a vision of people turning on her because of her power, and she’s scared. Her father, not she, responds:
We’ll protect her. She can learn to control it, I’m sure. Until then, we’ll lock the gates. We’ll reduce the staff. We will limit her contact with people, and keep her powers hidden from everyone. Including Anna.
There are several things wrong with this. The biggest problem is that it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what control is. Control is the ability to use force precisely—to accomplish one’s intentions without causing other effects. Control is what allows an adult that can snap a tree branch in half to make a crib for a baby then caress it while it’s lying down to go to sleep. What the King intends is for Elsa to suppress her power.
The difference between those two is stark. Elsa’s power is natural to her—this was made explicit when the troll chief asked if she was born with the power or cursed, and her father answered “born with it”. To control her power is to become fully herself, that is, to act in full accord with her nature. To suppress her power is to act against her nature and to be less than herself.
The other major problem is that the King is entirely passive in this, despite being Anna’s father. He uses the passive voice, “She can learn,” not “We will teach her.” He wants the problem to just go away—he wants Elsa to raise herself.
Indeed, his only real contribution to helping Elsa even to suppress her powers as she grows is to give her gloves and the extremely unhelpful advice:
Conceal it. Don’t feel it. Don’t let it show.
A person can direct their attention, to some degree at least, but cannot control what they feel. What they can do is control how they act in spite of their feelings. Control requires some positive goal, however, that can be focused on in spite of whatever feelings the world may thrust upon one. This, Elsa is not given. (We’ll come back to this, because the movie does.)
We then fast-forward in time, and the King and Queen die in a storm at sea, leaving the two girls orphans. Some time later, it is “Coronation Day” when Elsa is old enough to be crowned queen. (How the government of Arandel works is not explained, and even the technology is a weird mismash of the mid-1800s, the late middle ages, and everything inbetween.)
At the coronation party, Anna spends time getting to know a man she met earlier that day when he bumped into her. His name is Prince Hans, of the Southern Isles. They have a whirlwind romance in the space of an hour or two, culminating in Prince Hans proposing marriage and Anna accepting. When they ask the new Queen for her blessing, she refuses, and getting angry in response to Anna’s anger, she impulsively creates a large wall of ice as a barrier to keep Anna way. Her powers revealed to everyone, she runs away into the mountains, where we get the most famous song of the movie:
The snow glows white on the mountain tonight
Not a footprint to be seen
A kingdom of isolation
And it looks like I’m the queen
The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I’ve tried
Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know
Well, now they know
Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door
I don’t care what they’re going to say
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway
…
It’s funny how some distance makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me can’t get to me at all
It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free
Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
Let it go, let it go
You’ll never see me cry
Here I stand and here I stay
Let the storm rage on
My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around
And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast
I’m never going back, the past is in the past
Let it go
The cold never bothered me anyway
Let it go, let it go
And I’ll rise like the break of dawn
Let it go, let it go
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on
the cold never bothered me anyway
The music and Idina Mendel’s singing sound great, but if you pay attention to the lyrics, they are basically the lyrics of a villain. And, in fact, Elsa is the villain of this movie. She is a realistic villain, though, not a cartoon villain. I think the reason that has confused so many people is that this movie is a cartoon. Still, it is what it is; Elsa is a realistic villain, who is scared and afraid and wrong and doesn’t really mean anyone any harm even though she causes them harm she is culpable for.
Anna goes after her sister to try to bring Elsa back. (Along the way she finds Christoff, who agrees to help her in exchange for carrots for his reindeer.) When she finds Elsa, Elsa tells her to go away, that she’ll be safe as long as Elsa is alone. Anna tells Elsa that in fact Elsa has created a perpetual winter of Arandel, and no one is safe. Elsa is distraught, partially at what she’s done, but mostly that it means that she can’t be free. During a musical number when Anna is singing that they can solve the problem together and Elsa is complaining that she can’t be free, she lets out a blast of her power that hits Anna in the heart. She tells Anna to leave, then when Anna refuses to abandon Elsa, she creates a snow monster to force Anna to leave.
Here we see Elsa more-or-less explicitly choosing to be a villain when confronted with the choice between selfishness and love. She does, after this, try to stop the snow on Arandel by repeating to herself, over and over, “Don’t feel. Don’t feel,” as if that could somehow do some good. It’s not that she doesn’t care about Arandel at all; the problem is that she will only care about it on her terms. Even if she couldn’t stop the eternal winter, her power, used in Arandel, could do much to alleviate the suffering the eternal winter is causing. She doesn’t even consider this, because she lets her fear control her.
Anna begins to feel the effects of Elsa’s blast, and Christoff takes her to the trolls to get her help. There the troll chief tells her:
Anna, your life is in danger. There is ice in your heart, put there by your sister. If not removed, to solid ice will you freeze, forever.
Christoff asks if the troll chief can remove it.
I cannot. I’m sorry, Christoff. If it was her head, that would be easy, but only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart.
One of the trolls suggests that a “true love’s kiss” might be such an act of love, and Christoff takes Anna to Prince Hans. He leaves her in Arandel, trusting that she will be taken care of. Anna is brought by the servants to Prince Hans, and there left alone with him. He reveals that he never loved Anna but only sought power, and her desperation to be loved made her easy prey. He douses the fire and leaves her to die while he goes off to kill the queen and usurp the throne.
However, Elsa escapes from the dungeon and creates a raging storm that obscures most things. Christoff sees the storm and comes back to help Anna. She sees him riding his reindeer toward her and stumbles out of the castle In the climax of the movie, just as Christoff and Anna almost find each other Anna sees Prince Hans about to kill Elsa. Anna rushes in and protects her sister with her body. She turns to solid ice a moment before the sword hits her, and in a magic blast from her turning to ice the sword is shattered and Prince Hans is knocked back, unconscious.
Elsa, seeing her sister turned into an ice statue, weeps over her, but a moment later Anna begins to thaw. Elsa asks Anna why she sacrificed herself for Elsa, and Anna replies, “because I love you.” Elsa, enlightened, realizes that love can end the raging storm, and she thaws Arandel, ending the permanent winter.
It is tempting to take all this as a mere reversal of the common trope; instead of the man saving Anna she saves herself. It is entirely possible that was how this plot came to be. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the writer was trying to do, what she did was to write a very Christian story.
Anna was saved, not by another creature’s romantic love for her, but by her generous love for another. “Greater love hath no man,” says Christ, “than to lay down his life for a friend.”
Anna was not, however, alone. Had Christoff not first loved her (in the sense of generous love) enough to take her to Prince Hans, what followed would not have happened. Had he not loved her enough to come back for her when he saw that Arandel was in danger, she would not have left the castle where she was huddling next to the fire for warmth, and would not have been near Elsa when Prince Hans moved to strike her down. In short, she was only able to make her sacrifice for her sister because of the love she was shown.
And then we get to the fascinating metaphor of there being ice in her heart put there by her sister. Here we have a recognition that a person can, if they let themselves, become twisted by another. Eve Keneinan has pointed out, more than once, that in the modern world we like to believe that victims are, by virtue of their victimhood, virtuous. Quite the contrary, victims often become vicious. And here we have that acknowledgement—Anna will die, if she cannot love, because of her sister’s hurting her.
We also, in all this, see how well Elsa’s power works as a metaphor for intellectual power. When she merely, through her power, gave her sister a wrong idea, the troll chief could fix that. But when, through her selfishness, she hurt her sister’s heart, fixing that could not be done by another. It’s an excellent metaphor for Modern Philosophy and things like Classical Liberalism (a la Voltaire). Where someone is merely wrong about these things as an idea, he can be set right by another through simple argumentation. When people act on these bad ideas, they injure themselves and others in ways that mere argumentation cannot fix. Having put theory into practice, it no longer suffices to change the theory. They must now repent. The Greek for “repent” is μετάνοια (metanoia). More literally, to turn around. Ideas are dangerous, but practice is more dangerous. Ideas have consequences.
There is another fascinating bit, when Christoff brings Anna to the trolls to heal her, they misunderstand at first and think that he brought Anna as a potential wife. When they find out that she’s reluctant, they sing a song asking her why. In this song they say that he’s a bit of a fixer-upper, and talk about some of his superficial flaws, but point out (obliquely) that these are merely superficial. There is, however, a very curious caveat that they put into the song:
We’re not saying you can change him, ’cause people don’t really change
We’re only saying that love’s a force that’s powerful and strange
People make bad choices if they’re mad, or scared, or stressed
Throw a little love their way (throw a little love their way) and you’ll bring out their best
True love brings out their best!
The first thing to note is that this caveat, though important, is (as stated) wrong. People do change. People can also change each other. Heck, the main plot point of the movie is that Elsa changed her sister (“put ice in her heart”).
What is true is that people can very rarely change other people according to their intentions. Most of the time the effect we have on others is not the effect we intend to have. The other important thing to note is that we can only change others when they are ready to change. You can’t take a drunkard and make him sober. You can, possibly, help him to become sober when he’s ready to become sober. And you probably won’t know when that is.
This is especially true with romantic partners, because (God willing) romantic partners are soon to become parents. They will soon have a ton of work to do in raising new people to be human beings. This means that they will both be under a lot of stress, rely on each other constantly, and will have very little in the way of energy left to try to change each other anyway. In short, the last people who can intentionally change each other are romantic partners.
Except about superficial stuff. Then they’re really good at it.
A husband and wife, if they’re even quarter-way decent human beings, want to get along with each other. They need to be tolerant of each other’s failings, but in general they will be pretty willing to load the dishwasher differently or accommodate themselves to toilet paper being put on the roll incorrectly, or what-have-you. Superficial similarities are worthless, because the superficial stuff does change pretty readily.
The big problem, in mate selection, is mistaking something important like character or honesty for something superficial like how one prefers the toilet paper to be on the roll. Unrefined people can become refined fairly readily, and if they don’t, it doesn’t actually matter all that much. People can compromise that muddy clothes can come into the basement, but they have to stay there. By contrast, vicious people can become virtuous, but it’s a terrible bet to make with one’s children’s future.
Plus, vicious people becoming virtuous often requires something dramatic, like sacrificing one’s life for them.
Moana Is Kind of OK as a Movie
Having a two year old daughter I’ve had to watch “boana” a bunch of times now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not a good movie. It’s kind of OK. It’s mostly pretty. It’s got a few halfway decent songs. That’s about as much as can be said for it.
The first problem is that it’s not uniformly pretty. Why is it that Disney animators can’t draw adult males any more? I heard that some Polynesians were offended that Maui was drawn as an obese semi-giant-semi-dwarf, and their point is quite fair, since Maui looked bad. But this wasn’t just Maui, it was also Moana’s father. It was true of the father in Brave, too. I’m sure that somebody will say that they’re not ugly, they’re stylized. I’d consider accepting that if:
- This was how females were drawn, too.
- They didn’t look ugly.
Frankly, it’s probably largely laziness. Animation has gotten ever-more expensive over time with less money becoming available to it, and so it’s gotten noticeably worse over time as the animators have to come up with ways to save time and money.
I suspect it’s also partially that Disney has given up on its cartoons being for the whole family. Since they’re now primarily advertisements for dolls, backpacks, etc., there’s no point in making them enjoyable by the whole family. They’re only supposed to appeal you very young girls, and very young girls probably don’t pay much attention to father figures in movies. To most children’s story writers, parents are at best a necessary evil.
This almost makes talking about the story of Moana pointless, since it’s largely just an excuse for set pieces, but I had to watch the thing so I feel entitled to talk about it anyway. What I find most disappointing is that it’s an adventure story with no hero.
Moana is the closest thing that one finds to a hero in the story but she’s just not competent enough to be a hero. Granted, she’s a child, but that’s just the problem—the protagonist is someone who can’t be expected to be competent.
Or rather, they throw her into circumstances she’s not competent enough for. “Competence” does, after all, take an object—it only makes sense when you specify what one is competent at. They put Moana into circumstances which require a skilled adult and have her succeed either by sheer luck or outright cheating. For example, never having sailed before, Moana is able to sail a boat on the high seas. There’s no reason given for this, she just succeeds. And the wind is, for some reason, always at her back.
When she finally flips over the boat—many hours (or days?) after she should have—the ocean then just puts her where she should be. Why it didn’t do this at first is never even hinted at. You can get away with that on a wise character who has the best interests of the character at heart, but nowhere in the movie is the ocean portrayed as wise. Which reminds me—where are any of the other gods? Specifically, where is the god of the sea? This is a theoretically polytheistic story and yet the events of the story happen in a vacuum. This is just nothing like the actual mythology one gets within polytheistic cultures.
Then we get to Maui, who makes no sense and even less sense when considered as a demigod. Leaving aside the ridiculousness of doing various things for humans in order to feel wanted, he would have been celebrated. There’s a ridiculous scene where Maui admits that everything he did for humans was to try to make them love him, but it was never enough. The amount of cussing that would be require to convey how nonsensical this is would be tedious, so I’ll just omit it, but seriously, what? After Maui did the various feats that he did there would be shrines to him everywhere. Polytheists are only too willing to worship anything they thought brought them benefits and might bring them more.
Oh, and Maui was intending to imprison Moana in a cave on his Island in order to steal her boat. There will certainly be gods and demi-gods like this in polynesian mythology, but they don’t come round to doing the right thing after a pep talk. Consider how utterly gratuitous imprisoning her in a cave without food was—he could easily have just stolen her boat—at least as far as he knew at the time. He was basically just murdering her for fun. Which he did again by throwing her into the ocean. And what’s with him trying to jump off the boat—just a few minutes before, he explained that he needed the boat because he can do everything but float.
Oh, and when Moana rescued Maui from Tamatoa, she lifted him up and half carried him out of his cave. This is another example of outright cheating in order to make her competent. Moana probably weighs somewhere in the vicinity of 100 pounds. Probably less, but let’s be really generous and say 100. Maui is going to weight somewhere around 400 or 500 pounds. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that say that he’s stylized and only weighs around 300 pounds. A 100 pound teenage girl is not going to be able to lift or carry a 300 pound limp weight. Even if Maui were helping a little bit, he would just crush Moana. She’s had no real physical training and her exercise had all been running around and climbing. I’ve no doubt that she can do a lot of pullups and has great endurance, but a 300 pound weight would just crush her. It makes no sense at all that they had Moana carry Maui out of the cave. The weaker companion rescuing the stronger companion who just got beaten in combat and was soon to be killed has been done many times. The right way to do it is to have the weaker one distract the opponent (which, granted, she did) giving the hero time to retreat. When it’s done well the hero uses his remaining strength to save the weaker one too, making them an actual team. Instead, for no discernible reason, Moana picks up things she shouldn’t be able to pick up.
And I should point out that this isn’t a male-vs-female thing. The boy in Last Action Hero never carried Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And then we come to Te-Ka. Given that Te-Ka is actually Te-Fiti, her placement on a barrier island simply makes no sense. My eight year old son also noticed this. Why, when Maui steals the heart of Te-Fiti, did Te-Ka instantly arise on a barrier island? And, for that matter, why did Maui try to directly fight Te-Ka rather than just, say, turning around and going a different way?
Which then brings up the question, where did the rest of the barrier island come from? Why was there even a barrier island? With Te-Fiti gone, why was Te-Ka protecting the worthless rock where Te-Fiti used to be? And how was the rest of the barrier island formed in a ring? There’s no indication that anyone ever tried to sail to where Te-Fiti had been, so why did Te-Ka produce lava there to hard into rock? It was obviously necessary that the barrier island form a ring around where Te-Fiti had been or Moana could have just sailed around it, but there’s just no in-plot explanation for this.
For that matter, why did the writers think that the barrier island was even necessary? It would have made more sense and solved more problems if Te-Ka had arisen on the Island which Te-Fiti had been. In particular this would have solved the problem of: why didn’t Maui fly over Te-Ka? Heck, why didn’t Maui fly around Te-Ka? Moana was able to outsail Te-Ka sideways. Why would a shape-shifting trickster have full-frontal-assault as plan A?
And finally, why do girl-power movies always have to have the power involved being—not actual power—but willful stupidity? Moana decides that she’s going to return the heart on her own. (Not that it matters, but why doesn’t she ask the sea to give her the heart again? Why on earth is the pacific ocean only 30 feet deep where she is, miles away from any island?) She then—predictably—fails and is saved by Maui. So much for empowerment. Defeating a giant lava monster is not something which one mortal on a boat is going to be able to do—incidentally, someone at Disney really should have looked up the difference between sail boats and motor boats—so why did Moana decide to do it? This doesn’t make her strong, it makes her dumb. If she had tried to recruit some allies, even unwitting ones—for example, luring the kakamura in to fight Te-Ka—that would have made vastly more sense. Had she recruited the ocean to help her get past Te-Ka, that too would have made vastly more sense. Anything which could at least possibly have worked would have made vastly more sense.
Alternatively, Disney could have scaled down the lava monster so that Moana at least had a chance of defeating it herself.
It’s not that I necessarily disagree with the writer’s goals—whatever they were—the problem is that what they wrote served no possible purpose. It just didn’t hang together at all.
Incidentally, who thought it would be a good idea to have the climax of the movie in slow motion and to have Moana sing a really dumb song where a mortal reassures a goddess that being a lava monster doesn’t define her? Seriously? The tone of this is almost perfectly wrong.
Oh, and as for the ending—who on earth is going to let their toddler sit unguarded on the pontoon of a boat going at fifteen or twenty knots?
Chris Lansdown 