木兰重装上阵，传奇还是败笔？

The original ballad is fascinating, partly because most of it involves Mulan’s departure and return, privileging her life with her family and reducing her years of battle to a handful of lines. Like other screen adaptations, this one spends considerable time on her life as a soldier — movies love war — including her training under Commander Tung.

The updated Mulan is told on a grand scale and is chockablock with breathtaking sets and costumes and impressive battle sequences. But it’s missing the original film’s humor and daring, telling a fairly conventional tale of a stoic warrior whose adoption of a male identity is little more than a means to an end.  Mulan essentially turns into a straightforward war movie with a mere dash of magic.

The movie takes on gender more boldly than it handles warfare. One of the lessons of Mulan’s tale is that women and men aren’t simply equals, but are finally indistinguishable when and where it counts: on the move, on the run, in the heat of the battle. 

Whether she navigates gender satisfyingly is yet another question, one that will be best answered by the girls and women who yearn for more characters that look like them, speak to them. Some will find it here; others will take this story and run with it: they will wear its costumes, play with its dolls, and they will rewatch, rethink, remake this tale until it becomes a perfect reflection of their desires.

The new Mulan is a sweeping action movie with lots of cool fight choreography, and yet it never musters up a sense of awe.  It’s just inert, a lifeless bit of product that will probably neither satisfy die-hards nor enrapture an entire new generation of fans.

It hurries us through the basic beats of Mulan’s story, from humble village girl bound for arranged marriage to military hero of the empire, and, after some just-fine battle sequences, dumps us out at the end, gesturing heavily toward an impressiveness it never actually conjured.

While trying to steer clear of cultural faux pas, the movie sinks with its over-exoticised exposition and repetitive dialogue.

The next sin is over-Sinicising the exposition. It is the verbal equivalent of crowding a set with "Oriental" lanterns and calligraphic scrolls while an extra in a top-knot slurps noodles from a bowl.

For starters, a choice was made to have everyone speak English in a simplified, non-idiomatic manner. This is an odd decision because if you want characters in ancient China to speak English, you might as well go all in, and have them use the language as naturally and freely as Aladdin's characters do.

It happens with "qi", mentioned with dismaying frequency as an explanation for Mulan's unfeminine ways. If a word-cloud were to be made from the dialogue, "qi" and "family honour" would fight for top place.

But the worst example of overdoing the gravitas must be the phrase "Loyal, brave, true", uttered an excruciating number of times. Putting aside how it is what's known as "tattoo Chinese" - the clunky, Google-translated text favoured by those seeking ethnic ink on their bodies - it is a mantra that sounds profound at first but meaningless if one takes five minutes to think it over.

Xianniang is the movie’s most vibrant creation and an original addition to the Mulan chronicles.

This new Mulan places a 21st-century emphasis on the parallels between Mulan and Xianniang. They are polar opposites, but both are women who have infiltrated a man’s world; both must use shapeshifting subterfuge to assert themselves, both in battle against the enemy and also to fit in with their comrades. 

Mulan understands Xianniang and she fights the exact same fight against society, however they each used different approach. There is something troubling in that a woman will choose the patriarchal society that rejected her over creating something new by allying with a woman who has already trod her path. Mulan chooses the loyalty she knows, imperfect as it is, over a potential new loyalty, even if it sees her for who she truly is.