115 min | PG-13 | September 4, 2020 | Disney+
A young woman cuts her hair, straps on her father’s armor, and rides off to war pretending to be a man. Niki Caro trades the cartoon’s songs for sweeping wuxia battles and golden vistas. The pictures are gorgeous. The person inside the armor never shows up.
Hua Mulan disguises herself as a man to take her aging father’s place in the Imperial Army. That is the entire engine of the story, and Niki Caro’s live-action remake knows it. This is a film about a woman who must hide what she is in order to do what she is good at. It strips the songs and the talking dragon from the 1998 animated film and replaces them with wuxia spectacle and a story about chi, honor, and the cost of pretending. The film wants to be an epic about authenticity. It keeps undercutting that ambition with a script that tells the audience how to feel instead of showing it.
Liu Yifei plays Mulan with poise and physical command but little interior life. She fights with conviction and registers the strain of the deception, yet the script gives her almost nothing to play between battles. Donnie Yen brings gravity to Commander Tung, the mentor who trains her without knowing who she is. Gong Li is the most interesting presence on screen as Xian Niang, a shape-shifting witch who is the dark mirror of Mulan. Xian Niang is a powerful woman cast out for being powerful, and Gong Li plays her as bitter and seductive and almost sympathetic. Jet Li disappears under makeup and ceremony as the Emperor, and Jason Scott Lee snarls through Böri Khan with no shading at all.
Caro directs from a script by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Lauren Hynek, and Elizabeth Martin. The cinematography by Mandy Walker is the strongest element. Walker shoots the training-camp dawns and the mountain battlefields in saturated golds and reds that turn the Chinese landscape into a storybook. The costume design dresses Mulan and her family in layered silks that the camera lingers on with real attention. The action is staged with wirework that floats the actors above the ground in the wuxia tradition, and the editing cuts away from impact often enough to keep the PG-13 violence clean and weightless.
The film is a beautiful object built around a hollow center. Every time it reaches for emotion it reaches instead for a slogan, and the four-word motto carved on the father’s sword does more narrative work than any scene of human connection. The chi mythology turns Mulan into a chosen one from birth and drains the original story of its whole point. Mulan was supposed to earn her place through grit, not inherit it through destiny. Caro delivers the scale and the images. She never finds the person underneath the armor.