In 2020, Disney unveiled a new live action adaptation to add to the heap of trash they’d put out thus far, Mulan, a classic Disney film. People had high hopes that Mulan would be an exception. It was not. The live action adaptation of Mulan is so bad; I think it outranks any and all live action adaptations Disney has made to date, yes, even worse than Lion King. Now, enough talking about what a bad movie it is, let me tell you why.

Recently, Disney’s lineup of live-action remakes of classic movies have been mediocre at best, taking the life and soul of the movies we know and love. Mulan is on another level of terrible, taking out the best characters in the movie, adding entirely new plot points and taking out the best ones from the original, taking out the music and all the good parts of the movie out in general. They take out Yao, Ling, and Chien Po (Mulan’s bullies turned friends) Mushu and Shang, which is just unforgivable.

In films, cinematography is important as it helps the viewer get immersed or grounded in a scene and the live-action Mulan has decent cinematography, too bad it’s ruined by the absolutely abhorrent editing. The editing is so bad I got a migraine during my watch-through with a cut happening essentially every second never once letting you get grounded in a scene and just being awful to look at. Not only is the editing bad, the script is just forgettable. I watched the movie and a video on it only around 2-4 weeks ago. I can’t remember a single line from the movie, not a single one, meanwhile I can remember multiple quotes from the original.

While editing, characters and immersion are all very important in a movie. All of them are arguably less important than a good plot. This movie takes the original Mulan plot and throws it into a dumpster, then burns it; that’s the plot it uses. They added in a supernatural element to the rather grounded story of mulan in the form of a shapeshifting witch who turns on the main villain for essentially no reason at the end of the movie. And not only that, they make the Huns’ own stupidity kill them rather than have Mulan use her smarts to outsmart them and cause the avalanche, which doesn’t teach children anything about women empowerment, considering Mulan does essentially nothing in this movie. Also, not to discredit how hard acting is, but Mulan’s actress felt robotic and didn’t bring the part to life like the original voice actress did.

After all that, if you have Disney+, don’t waste the time you could be watching good movies (like the original Mulan) on this disgrace of a film. That’s about all I had to say, but please, don’t watch this movie.