Long story short, I hate this movie with all my being, It’s no surprise that the Mulan live-action is thoroughly repulsive. Most Disney live-action movies fail to deliver, but at least they try to stay faithful to the movie they were based on. In this review, I will be referring to the original movie and poem. This movie has been out for almost a year now, so bear in mind that I will be spoiling most of it.

The movie introduced Qi, energy, a vital life force held by every living entity,  It is implied that a lot of men can use qi but Mulan out of the rest of the army is displayed as the only one who can other characters who use qi are the witch, bori khan, and the emperor and that would be all of the characters we see using qi. This isn’t an unimportant addition, it’s fine it was just executed terribly. 

Unimportant additions: some characters are just unneeded in the movie, such as the sister she has no personality outside of being afraid of spiders, in every scene she is included in there is a mention of spiders and that’s all she’s there for, their relationship isn’t developed and she seems to only be important during the matchmaking screen when a spider conveniently appears in front of her. Chen Honghui the “love interest” doesn’t do anything either, that’s all I can say about him, he is not important his purpose is to gush over how cool Mulan is and get rejected at the end. The phoenix means nothing, this was Mushu’s replacement and it is very disappointing, the only thing it did was lead Mulan to places, and that’s all, except one part of the movie when it’s just there to look cool. The Witch addition to the movie kinda sucks, she gets little character development until she just dies in a scene where the Pheonix would have been more helpful, she teams up with Bori Khan for an unknown reason, they are displayed to dislike each other and the witch is strong enough to just do things herself.

The tone of the movie isn’t its best, I don’t feel anything while watching it, the movie want’s to take itself seriously, but why? Mulan is one of the only Disney “princesses” to have a character in a war situation, while serious the 1998 movie helped lighten the situation with comical characters and memorable songs, but it also knew how to be serious when it needed to. Mulan in the 2020 movie is a very dislikable character, I don’t agree with most of the things she does, she comes off as annoying, the beginning scene where she’s chasing a chicken off the roof just makes her seem like a show-off. The addition of qi just makes her better than everyone else.  In the 1998 film the song “I’ll make a man out of you” is used to display the army in a training montage, while it also develops Mulan as a character, in the 2020 movie the whole song is replaced with a boring training montage of them carrying buckets of water up a mountain, the worst part is that Mulan does it without problem, there’s no development nothing to make someone who is watching feel proud or pumped up. The only interesting thing about the movie was the amount of popcorn I had in front of me. 

This review has gone on too long that’s about all I really have to say about the movie, at least I can’t think of anything else.