Aquaman

2018 superhero movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Aquaman has to retrieve a magical fork so that he can defeat his half-brother, become king of Atlantis, and stop an impeding war with the people on land.

Jason Mamoa is a hunk of a man, but he's got less personality than most of the CGI aquatic animals in this movie. Part of his problem might be that the movie doesn't seem all that interested in creating anything but a hunk of a man. He's got some cliched reluctant superhero issues--parent issues, not fitting in anywhere, romantic troubles, general cockiness--but there's very little that distinguishes him from other superpeople or makes him non-generic.

James Wan knows how to pile ridiculousness on top of ridiculousness, and what makes this kind of fun is just how stupid it can be. The action set pieces--one on land in Sicily, most under the water with all sorts of ocean life and explosions--contain fathoms of CGI. They're very cartoonish, the kinds of things that old men might have a difficult time even comprehending. The cartoonish, very silly quality Wan brings to this sort-origin story clashes with the DC movie aesthetics. The brooding, bombastic score, the heroic poses and heroic quick zooms to characters, the rubbery-CGI fights, and the weird jagged pacing that I'd associate with the Justice League character movies take away a lot of the personality this movie should have. It's loud in superhero movie ways, it's trying to be funny in superhero movie ways, and it's exciting in superhero movie ways, but it struggles to become anything other than just another superhero movie albeit maybe a slightly goofier one.

Some of the actors don't seem to fit all that well. Momoa and Amber Heard are fine, and Nicole Kidman, even though it seems like she probably should have better things to do with her time, isn't completely out of place. Patrick Wilson's face doesn't seem to fit in this world at all, and Willem Dafoe looks completely lost, like he just stumbled onto the set and they decided to give him a role. Now he's played Jesus, Bobby Peru, Van Gogh, and a guy who rides on a hammerhead shark. Dolph Lundgren's also in this.

Hammerhead-shark riding is something I can handle in a movie like this. Where the goofiness really gets in the way are these other ill-timed moments that just get in the way. There's a moment in this when two characters kiss each other that was about as stupid as anything I've seen in a movie. There are too many moments like that, times when this thing needs to flow but kind of clunks along instead.

Still, I really enjoyed a lot of the visual appeal. The underwater stuff--the glowing cities, the bioluminescent ocean animals and a lot of the imaginary creatures, some of the costumes (I was particularly fond of one of Amber Heard's outfits, a dress that had a collar of jellyfish and waving tentacles), the modes of transportation including both the technologically-advanced ships and the riding on seahorses and hammerhead sharks--kept my eyes glued to the screen even when I was a little bored. I liked the look of giant-headed, bug-eyed villain (Mantis, I guess), too, although his character arc was both generic and implausible.

I wish the conflict with the Atlantis folk and the land people would have been developed a little better. It seems like Wan wanted to address environmental concerns or something like that but just didn't have the heart.