So Frozen 2 is probably a movie you are either looking forward to or dreading. I was looking forward to it… I really like Frozen (and even that song). So I saw the sequel Friday and… well… it’s certainly a movie. A Disney movie. But there’s something weird about it… my thought while watching it was, “at no point should someone ever be… confused… watching a Frozen movie.”
So, yeah, Frozen 2 picks up not too long after the previous movie and involves a never-before-mentioned northern country and its magical locked-down forest, the ghosts of the past, and a quest to free the land from a curse. And the magical barrier, spirits of nature, indigenous peoples, the remnant of a previous expedition, a decades-old mystery, a dam, and a magical river of memory. Since the movie is set up like a mystery and because of some rushed and fuzzy-headed, ambling story progression, a lot of what’s going on in the story is weirdly vague and unfocused. I think they have a good story told poorly with unconvincing motivations, knowledge, and progression. Not saying it’s too hard to figure out, just saying that there are stretches where what’s going on is vague and poorly told.
Which is all a very weird things to say about a Frozen movie. This shouldn’t be complicated and character motivations and actions so poorly planned out. It’s a Disney movie for children. The film opens dodgy and it just gets worse as vaguely explained things happen to Arendale and our heroes – Elsa, Anna, Sven, Olaf, and Kristoff – go on a quest to find a magical voice and figure out what is ravaging their country (which happens in a rushed, G rated sort of way). It involves this magical forest which they spend too much time wandering around in before the two girls figure out the plot. I was genuinely a little nnmbored and befuddled by a lot of this mid-story content and was getting ready to write the movie off.
One thing Frozen did was kind of skewer Disney and fairy tale stories a bit. There was a kind of joy in poking the eye of true love and love at first sight stuff that happens so much in older Disney films. This movie doesn’t really do any of that… it is focused on a more traditional fantasy adventure story. It does still star exclusively two strong ladies so I guess, in that respect, it’s still targeting old fashioned stories, sure. And I guess this is them getting away from the bare-bones Ice Queen fantasy story they were allegedly telling the first time. They needed their own story to tell and they set out to to do it. So good on them.
And, to be fair, the third act of the film does some truly beautiful things and gives our two leading ladies motivations and personal change that are really well done. For Elsa, that means a stirring song and a physical change that’s really quite pretty… and interesting revelations that change her character. For Anna… well… she gets a pretty motivational but fatalistic song and she makes a choice that’s actually kind of “wow, that’s important, necessary, but dark”… but I’m not sure if the character’s progression really justified her moment of choice. But whatevs, I guess, since it resulted in character growth.
Less interesting are the rest of the cast. Kristoff might as well not be in the movie except they insist upon giving him a plot so we have to hang around him for too long. Which means he gets his own song which is this super weird 80s power ballad complete with Queen (the group) imagery? The song gets a Weezer cover in the end credits (and another song is covered by Panic! A the Disco). Olaf the Snowman is a character I thought was going to be ear-wrenchingly terrible in the first movie but I was surprised he wasn’t. He is a bit more teeth-grinding this time and gets “me too” songs that are too derivative of the first film. But he also gets off some good laughs… but he just kind of feels like, “well, he worked in the first movie… let’s do it again only more!” this time. There’s a few new characters that are being marketed by Disney but most of them don’t matter at all. Only one – a guard – gets some funny – and very cool – moments.
The movie kind of ends with a few story elements unexplained. The story is so fuzzy at times that I’m not sure if those were just forgotten in the editing or if they are intended as setup for a Frozen 3. Since the movie is so flighty story-wise, it’s hard to be 100% sure…And that’s a problem endemic to the movie’s weird and weirdly fuzzy plot.
As a minor fan of Anna and Elsa as characters, I think this movie did enough to be a mild recommendation. I guess if you don’t like the characters though, there may be no reason to see this movie. It’s fairly original but it doesn’t skewer Disney and fairy tale tropes in any unique way. It kind of tells its own complex story but it tells it in a pretty vague hand-wavey way. Maybe the more complex nature of the story will entice you – it’s certainly deeper than the first flick. I think this movie needed a few more passes at the screenwriting stage… but they made what they made and it’s not bad.
Score: 82