Aquaman (2018)
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language
Score: 4 out of 5
How do you successfully bring Aquaman to the big screen and not make the entire concept seem silly? Ever since the Super Friends cartoon in the '70s, the idea of Aquaman being a "joke" superhero has been so ingrained in popular culture that a major story arc on Entourage concerned the uphill battle that Warner Bros. and protagonist Vincent Chase had to undertake to get casual audiences to take the character seriously in a blockbuster movie directed by James Cameron. This is just not a movie where a "dark and gritty" telling of the story, especially that which Warner Bros. and DC Comics have applied to Superman and Batman in recent years, was going to work at all -- no matter what they did, there was just no way that any filmmaker, not even Christopher Nolan himself, was going to get people's preconceived notions of Aquaman out of their heads.
Well, fortunately, James Wan did not go that route. Instead, he fused the fundamental silliness of the character and his mythos (right down to a comics-accurate costume) with a far more palatable brand of silliness for modern audiences: namely, that of the Fast and the Furious films (Wan having directed the seventh one), which are as much about very muscular men yelling at each other about family while performing feats of macho badassery as they are about fast cars going fast. He embraced the nautical imagery of the character, with scenes on fishing boats and submarines and in coastal towns in Maine and Sicily, while making Aquaman's characterization less "hardcore MMA bro" like he was in Justice League and more "salty sailor". He brings his usual action chops to full bear here working on a superhero movie, going for broke with the action scenes to produce something that I've frequently seen compared to a live-action shonen anime -- and I certainly wasn't complaining. And speaking of Justice League, the events of that mistake of a film are mentioned only once in a throwaway line, just to let the hardcore DC Extended Universe fans know that they aren't completely jettisoning the canon and starting from scratch but otherwise not concerning itself with anything that happened there. This and Wonder Woman are really the sort of films that Warner Bros. and DC should've started with in the first place, well-made standalone origin stories that are less concerned with building out a sprawling, interconnected mythos and more concerned with just being really good blockbuster action flicks -- incidentally, the plan that DC's, uh, marvelous competition went with when they were finding their footing. At long last, there's some serious competition in the superhero movie arena.
Our protagonist is Arthur Curry, the son of a lighthouse keeper and the princess Atlanna, who fled an arranged marriage in the underwater kingdom of Atlantis. Arthur is raised as a human in Maine by his father, but is taught the history of Atlantis by his mother, who hopes that one day he will reunite the worlds of the surface and the sea. After Atlanna is found and must return home, she sends her advisor Vulko to train her son to be a warrior -- and fortunately, the half-human, half-Atlantean Arthur has such powers as super-strength, breathing underwater, and the ability to communicate with and command all the creatures of the sea. He puts these powers to use when his half-brother Orm, furious at the surface world's pollution of his home, sets out to unite the seven underwater kingdoms to declare war on the surface. Together with Vulko and the king's daughter Mera, both of whom are trying to undermine Orm behind the scenes, Arthur sets out to stop Orm after his home is attacked, all while staying one step ahead of Black Manta, a human pirate with a personal beef with Arthur who aligns himself with Orm in order to attain the weapons he needs to kill him.
I've kept the plot description as short as I reasonably could, largely ignoring the massive amount of backstory and infodumps. This is a film whose first act is easily its weakest, as it has to introduce the viewer to its sci-fi/fantasy mythology and doesn't do so in an entirely smooth manner. At several points, the story comes to a quick stop just to explain various concepts, like the history of Atlantis and how it wound up underwater, without really organically weaving it into the structure of the film. The result is a fairly mixed bag of an opening, as Nicole Kidman felt underused as Atlanna, spending more time dispensing information than establishing her character's relationship with Arthur and his father. It wasn't until about half an hour in that the film really fell into its groove, and even then, it often felt like it was trying to cram in too much at once, most notably with the Black Manta, who was seemingly only in this film to set him up as the villain in the sequel while giving comics fans something to chew on, and a plot twist that felt telegraphed the moment a character's likely fate was brought up.
Fortunately, once it did get moving, I had a great time. Atlantis is rendered in all the gorgeous and vivid detail that you'd expect of a fantastic locale in a $160+ million blockbuster, with creative applications of technology underwater combined with sea creatures like sharks, octopi, and even sea horses used for various things. It wasn't quite sci-fi and wasn't quite fantasy, but what it was was a world that looked and felt impressive and alien to anything that might exist on the surface. The main plot surrounding it is a lot simpler and easier to follow than it may seem at first glance, largely boiling down to "evil dude wants power, we need to stop him" and letting its Game of Thrones-style machinations simply add texture rather than any big twists. The same is true when the film goes to the surface for scenes in places like the Sahara and Sicily, shot with the same awe and focus on both their natural and man-made beauty. The structure often reminded me of an adventure film, as our heroes travel to exotic locales all over globe looking for clues on how to defeat the villain, except with a superhero twist that Indiana Jones probably never encountered. James Wan's amazing direction extends to the action sequences, which are some of the best I've ever seen in a superhero movie. It doesn't matter whether it's just two guys going at it in a ritualized deathmatch, a shootout and rooftop chase in a coastal village, or a massive climatic battle sequence between two armies; the action here is gorgeously shot and with a keen eye towards letting us know who is fighting who, as best shown in the first fight between Arthur and Orm in an arena built atop an undersea trench, where Arthur's jagged bronze armor is sharply contrasted with both Orm's smooth silver and the lava beneath them. All of it is heavily stylized with abundant CGI, but in the hands of a skilled operator like Wan, it feels inspired and epic in a way that few effects-driven blockbuster action movies do. It was almost as though he had binged an entire season of Dragon Ball before he got to work on this movie, between the explosive nature of some of the fights and the screaming matches that the characters get into with each other in between blows.
As for the cast, Jason Momoa had a lot of work to do here to impress me as Arthur given how I thought he was one of the weaker links in Justice League, and fortunately, here they give him a lot more to work with beyond playing a one-dimensional meathead. He's a blue-collar fisherman who's a lot smarter and better educated than he looks, but still celebrates his salt-of-the-earth upbringing by a lighthouse keeper, at first rejecting an Atlantean society that sees him as a half-breed mongrel. Not only is he an intensely physical presence in the action scenes, he carries more charisma here in five minutes than he did at any point in Justice League, the film wisely playing to his strengths in that department while giving him a great supporting cast to play off of. Nowhere is that more true than with Amber Heard's Mera, the polar opposite of Arthur in many ways but somebody who nonetheless makes an excellent foil and later love interest for him. The film builds them up together, letting them share the spotlight in many action scenes while establishing a mutual respect between them, illustrating that they're not so different after all despite their radically different upbringings (Mera is as much a, pardon the pun, fish out of water in the surface world as Arthur is in Atlantis). After a decade of smaller roles and false starts to her career, this is the film that ought to propel Heard to the A-list in a just world. Patrick Wilson, a longtime collaborator with James Wan on his horror films, is virtually unrecognizable as Orm, a surprisingly imposing villain given that Wilson is known for playing less action-oriented heroes, combined with righteous anger and the will to get his way. I similarly had trouble recognizing Willem Dafoe as Vulko, Arthur's mentor who teaches him how to fight and use his powers. And it was definitely fun seeing Dolph Lundgren playing the aging king of Atlantis, given how, thirty years ago, he starred in the live-action Masters of the Universe movie that this felt like a big-budget, beefed-up pseudo-remake of.
Well, fortunately, James Wan did not go that route. Instead, he fused the fundamental silliness of the character and his mythos (right down to a comics-accurate costume) with a far more palatable brand of silliness for modern audiences: namely, that of the Fast and the Furious films (Wan having directed the seventh one), which are as much about very muscular men yelling at each other about family while performing feats of macho badassery as they are about fast cars going fast. He embraced the nautical imagery of the character, with scenes on fishing boats and submarines and in coastal towns in Maine and Sicily, while making Aquaman's characterization less "hardcore MMA bro" like he was in Justice League and more "salty sailor". He brings his usual action chops to full bear here working on a superhero movie, going for broke with the action scenes to produce something that I've frequently seen compared to a live-action shonen anime -- and I certainly wasn't complaining. And speaking of Justice League, the events of that mistake of a film are mentioned only once in a throwaway line, just to let the hardcore DC Extended Universe fans know that they aren't completely jettisoning the canon and starting from scratch but otherwise not concerning itself with anything that happened there. This and Wonder Woman are really the sort of films that Warner Bros. and DC should've started with in the first place, well-made standalone origin stories that are less concerned with building out a sprawling, interconnected mythos and more concerned with just being really good blockbuster action flicks -- incidentally, the plan that DC's, uh, marvelous competition went with when they were finding their footing. At long last, there's some serious competition in the superhero movie arena.
Our protagonist is Arthur Curry, the son of a lighthouse keeper and the princess Atlanna, who fled an arranged marriage in the underwater kingdom of Atlantis. Arthur is raised as a human in Maine by his father, but is taught the history of Atlantis by his mother, who hopes that one day he will reunite the worlds of the surface and the sea. After Atlanna is found and must return home, she sends her advisor Vulko to train her son to be a warrior -- and fortunately, the half-human, half-Atlantean Arthur has such powers as super-strength, breathing underwater, and the ability to communicate with and command all the creatures of the sea. He puts these powers to use when his half-brother Orm, furious at the surface world's pollution of his home, sets out to unite the seven underwater kingdoms to declare war on the surface. Together with Vulko and the king's daughter Mera, both of whom are trying to undermine Orm behind the scenes, Arthur sets out to stop Orm after his home is attacked, all while staying one step ahead of Black Manta, a human pirate with a personal beef with Arthur who aligns himself with Orm in order to attain the weapons he needs to kill him.
I've kept the plot description as short as I reasonably could, largely ignoring the massive amount of backstory and infodumps. This is a film whose first act is easily its weakest, as it has to introduce the viewer to its sci-fi/fantasy mythology and doesn't do so in an entirely smooth manner. At several points, the story comes to a quick stop just to explain various concepts, like the history of Atlantis and how it wound up underwater, without really organically weaving it into the structure of the film. The result is a fairly mixed bag of an opening, as Nicole Kidman felt underused as Atlanna, spending more time dispensing information than establishing her character's relationship with Arthur and his father. It wasn't until about half an hour in that the film really fell into its groove, and even then, it often felt like it was trying to cram in too much at once, most notably with the Black Manta, who was seemingly only in this film to set him up as the villain in the sequel while giving comics fans something to chew on, and a plot twist that felt telegraphed the moment a character's likely fate was brought up.
Fortunately, once it did get moving, I had a great time. Atlantis is rendered in all the gorgeous and vivid detail that you'd expect of a fantastic locale in a $160+ million blockbuster, with creative applications of technology underwater combined with sea creatures like sharks, octopi, and even sea horses used for various things. It wasn't quite sci-fi and wasn't quite fantasy, but what it was was a world that looked and felt impressive and alien to anything that might exist on the surface. The main plot surrounding it is a lot simpler and easier to follow than it may seem at first glance, largely boiling down to "evil dude wants power, we need to stop him" and letting its Game of Thrones-style machinations simply add texture rather than any big twists. The same is true when the film goes to the surface for scenes in places like the Sahara and Sicily, shot with the same awe and focus on both their natural and man-made beauty. The structure often reminded me of an adventure film, as our heroes travel to exotic locales all over globe looking for clues on how to defeat the villain, except with a superhero twist that Indiana Jones probably never encountered. James Wan's amazing direction extends to the action sequences, which are some of the best I've ever seen in a superhero movie. It doesn't matter whether it's just two guys going at it in a ritualized deathmatch, a shootout and rooftop chase in a coastal village, or a massive climatic battle sequence between two armies; the action here is gorgeously shot and with a keen eye towards letting us know who is fighting who, as best shown in the first fight between Arthur and Orm in an arena built atop an undersea trench, where Arthur's jagged bronze armor is sharply contrasted with both Orm's smooth silver and the lava beneath them. All of it is heavily stylized with abundant CGI, but in the hands of a skilled operator like Wan, it feels inspired and epic in a way that few effects-driven blockbuster action movies do. It was almost as though he had binged an entire season of Dragon Ball before he got to work on this movie, between the explosive nature of some of the fights and the screaming matches that the characters get into with each other in between blows.
As for the cast, Jason Momoa had a lot of work to do here to impress me as Arthur given how I thought he was one of the weaker links in Justice League, and fortunately, here they give him a lot more to work with beyond playing a one-dimensional meathead. He's a blue-collar fisherman who's a lot smarter and better educated than he looks, but still celebrates his salt-of-the-earth upbringing by a lighthouse keeper, at first rejecting an Atlantean society that sees him as a half-breed mongrel. Not only is he an intensely physical presence in the action scenes, he carries more charisma here in five minutes than he did at any point in Justice League, the film wisely playing to his strengths in that department while giving him a great supporting cast to play off of. Nowhere is that more true than with Amber Heard's Mera, the polar opposite of Arthur in many ways but somebody who nonetheless makes an excellent foil and later love interest for him. The film builds them up together, letting them share the spotlight in many action scenes while establishing a mutual respect between them, illustrating that they're not so different after all despite their radically different upbringings (Mera is as much a, pardon the pun, fish out of water in the surface world as Arthur is in Atlantis). After a decade of smaller roles and false starts to her career, this is the film that ought to propel Heard to the A-list in a just world. Patrick Wilson, a longtime collaborator with James Wan on his horror films, is virtually unrecognizable as Orm, a surprisingly imposing villain given that Wilson is known for playing less action-oriented heroes, combined with righteous anger and the will to get his way. I similarly had trouble recognizing Willem Dafoe as Vulko, Arthur's mentor who teaches him how to fight and use his powers. And it was definitely fun seeing Dolph Lundgren playing the aging king of Atlantis, given how, thirty years ago, he starred in the live-action Masters of the Universe movie that this felt like a big-budget, beefed-up pseudo-remake of.
The Bottom Line
A guy who can command all the creatures of the sea sounds a lot more impressive once you see it in action. The DC Extended Universe has the tools to pull off a comeback story that would've seemed impossible just last year, and its foundation is built on films like this one: epic, bombastic, and willfully entertaining action movies that don't weigh themselves down in "expanded universe" franchise-building but instead just make you go "wow, that was awesome, can I have some more!?!?"
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