MovieChat Forums > Mulan (2020) Discussion > Bad reviews are mostly from poor underst...

Bad reviews are mostly from poor understanding or anti-female


I've read lots of complaints that don't really make sense to me.

1. Mulan was not a "chosen one" Ch'i is simply an energy force that is inside everyone. She developed her skills through a lot of focus, hardwork, and training. Trained by her father who was also a greatly skilled warrior/soldier. This is shown early in the movie.

2. Anti-female are the people who call it "SJW nonsense" Really they will find anything wrong with a strong female character and just call it "SJW" You can't have a strong female lead without these people complaining.

These are the 2 biggest gripes that everyone repeats. Neither are valid.

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or people who are against the crimes committed by communist china...

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1. When in the movie did Mulan develop her chi, exactly? The opening sequence shows her as a kid and she's already a martial arts master apparently. I seemed to have missed all the scenes of her father training her. Can you tell me when they were shown onscreen? Was it young Mulan being trained or old Mulan?

2. Do anti-females call any of the females in "Aliens" SJWs? How about Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz? How about Scarlett O'Hara? How about Elizabeth I? Margaret Thatcher? Elizabeth II? Harriet Tubman? How about Coco Chanel? How about Dagny Taggert? Makoto Kusanagi? Soryu Asuka Langley?

There's nothing wrong with strong female characters. What is wrong is them are being Mary Sues. What the hell did Mulan do? Why is her chi, stronger than everybody elses? How does her chi make her smarter than the veteran generals? I didn't know chi also equates to experience.

Go watch the Animated Mulan and compare it to Live Action Mulan. Do you notice a difference? What is that difference, exactly? Was Animated Mulan a Mary Sue?

Finally, we get the ending. I won't mention it for spoilers, but it is a 21st century woke ending.

In the ancient poem of Mulan, it ends with her comrades realizing she was a woman. They are surprised and shocked that she's a woman and she says,

Most people tell the gender of a rabbit by its movement:
The male runs quickly, while the female often keeps her eyes shut.

But when the two rabbits run side by side,
Can you really discern whether I am a he or a she?

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The most common gripes I've read are (1) that the movie doesn't have the charm, spirit, or characters of the original, (2) that people shouldn't be expected to pay additional funds to watch programming on Disney +, and (3) the movie goes above-and-beyond the call of duty to appeal to the Chinese market and winds up catering to their totalitarian government.

While I have seen people on message boards here complaining of SJW nonsense, I don't think this is a mainstream or widespread opinion, and when commenting on the film itself, most people I have noted seem to just dislike the film and say it isn't as good as the original.

Maybe that's not fair to compare the two (I personally think that it looks the most interesting of the Disney remakes since this is bringing something new to the table at least), but that's what I'm seeing.

When I read this defense of the film, it strikes me as an almost preemptive strike against dissent. "You just didn't 'get' the film," always strikes me as a bit of a cop-out, and "If you didn't like it, you're just biased!" doesn't work for me, either. It prevents any honest critique of the film.

Furthermore, finding a film to be "SJW nonsense" might indicate (as you say) alt-right misogynist looney-talk, but it also might point to somebody who just doesn't like propaganda and has detected a whiff of it in such-and-such a film. One of those is a person who needs to grow up and be mature in their approach to equal voices at the table, and the other is somebody who just doesn't want to have a self-righteous finger wagged in their face from marketing departments and executives.

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"2. Anti-female are the people who call it "SJW nonsense""

Oh sweet irony...

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1. The issue isn't when and where she developed her skills, it's that she's the only one to possess them. If she wasn't the chosen one, then why is there no other character who has developed their chi in the same way? Surely some of the other soldiers have former soldiers as fathers, who trained them in the same way Mulan was trained. Surely at least one other person in the army, if not the world, has similar abilities to Mulan. Surely Mulan's sibling, who's from the same family with the same parents, had the same training. Oh, wait. That's not the case. In fact, this movie takes pains to set Mulan apart from everyone else because of her rare powers. Hence she is the chosen one.

2. Most of the people who watched this couldn't be called anti-female, since everyone went in expecting a strong female lead. Almost everyone was disappointed by what they got, a weakly written and conveyed character whose gender is of little consequence. We didn't actually get a strong female lead is the whole problem.

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OP's nascent troll account. Either that or young people really are this dumb.

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