Mulan is the latest in Disney's sorry saga of so-called remakes. It pretends to be based on the 1998 animated film of the same name. At the same time it also pretends to be more accurate to the original story of Mulan. It fails at both, and also at being a good remake of any sort.
I haven't watched the film, but I saw the trailer and read its TVTropes page. From what I've seen I have no intention of ever watching the film.
Some of the best things about the original Mulan were its music and its villain. The remake isn't a musical and it completely changed the villain. When I read the plot summary I was left wondering if this was actually meant to be a version of Mulan at all. Why didn't the director just change the names and make a completely new film?
Remakes in general are on very shaky ground. Stay too close to the original film and they might as well never have been made. Stray too far from it and they stop being the same story at all. And when the original film was so good that a remake can't possibly improve on it, why waste all that time and money?
Disney remakes are notoriously terrible. Maleficent, although a badly-flawed film, is somewhat pardonable because it at least offered a completely different take on the original Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella and The Lion King... the best I can say for them is that they're just mediocre. The remake of Beauty and the Beast was unbearably awful. So is Mulan. And judging by Disney's current obsession with endless remakes, they'll make many, many more unbearably awful films 😒
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