Mulan is an incredible movie

Is Mulan a good film? No. Is Mulan a bad film? No.

Mulan is not a film.

Mulan takes the hallowed medium of cinema, lights it on fire, and then pisses all over it. Mulan is 115 minutes of Disney executives laying waste the legacies of the James Camerons, Ridley Scotts, John Woos, Wachowski sisters, and all the competent sprawling-epic-action-adventure filmmakers who ever lived.

You can enjoy Mulan, but that would be acquiescing to a new style of film-making: one devoid of vision, in denial of human emotion. Mulan is the culmination — the apotheosis — of the recent decision by corporate executives to remove everything good about cinema from cinema. Motivated solely by the bottom line and fed only by focus groups and consultants, Disney has produced a number of spectacularly successful yet utterly lifeless films, whose lineage can be traced back to 2012’s The Avengers and include the new Star Wars sequels.

All style, all substance, gone to dust, replaced by an uncanny valley applied to the movie as a whole. Films like this are unsettlingly polished, visually flawless, truly a complete sensory experience — yet lack the simple things that effective filmmakers do so well. Like lingering on scenes of emotional weight. Building suspense with finesse. Scenes that make you ask, “why is this scene here?”, then you only realize when you watch it again that it’s a critical expository moment. Or simply time to breathe. Films like Mulan seem to be written by an AI who stumbles to grasp the entirety of the human experience.

This was the problem with the Star Wars sequels: no, it wasn’t Rian Johnson’s bad writing, it wasn’t George Lucas getting kicked out of the writers room, it wasn’t the limited storytelling ability of JJ Abrams, and it wasn’t the lack of a unifying vision behind the trilogy: it was the fact that three movies had to be made in five years. This kind of system, where releases are meticulously scheduled and planned ahead, takes all of the artistic impulse out of these projects and turns them into bland consumer products. True art takes time and space. The creative process can’t be relied on to meet ambitious deadlines, no matter how hard one tries.

However… there is little visibly wrong with the film. The visuals are stunning. The acting is fine. The soundtrack is lovely. I won’t belabor the critique about Chinese culture being misrepresented because there are certainly millions of posts out there about that (although I did take a shot whenever they said “bring honor to my family). Also, I don’t care for the Mary Sue critique because really isn’t such a thing as a Mary Sue (surely Harry Potter and Michael Corleone are both Mary Sue, among countless other examples). It’s magic, who the fuck cares. The message of the film (women should lead, but family comes first; it’s okay to stay at home) is at worst inoffensive.

That’s the trick they pull on critical viewers and reviewers: there is ostensibly so little wrong with a film like Mulan/(insert any MCU or Star Wars sequel film here) that when one tries to explain that they didn’t like it, the ambient uncanny feeling that these movies give you is so hard to formulate that defenders of the film can say, “Hah, got you, there’s nothing wrong with this film.” It’s why these movies rack up good scores on Rotten Tomatoes: they’re filled to the brim with movie critic bait.

(Trump voice) can we just get Kung Fu Panda back, please?