For people whose only exposure to Aquaman was the various SuperFriends cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s, seeing the character played by the guy who previously played Khal Drogo, Ronon Dex, and Conan the Barbarian probably seemed a trifle odd. Readers of the comics, however, have seen lots of different iterations of the King of the Seven Seas, including the long-haired, bearded, brooding, snarky version initially written by Peter David in the 1990s.
The new Jason Momoa Aquaman film owes quite a bit to that portrayal, as well as the Atlantis backstory that David established in the Atlantis Chronicles and Aquaman: Time and Tide miniseries and the followup ongoing series that was written by David, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Erik Larsen, and Dan Jurgens.
It’s a big dumb goof of a movie, and while no one’s likely to put it in their top ten of superhero movies, it’s actually fun, an adjective that has rarely applied to DC’s theatrical efforts in this century.
SPOILERS FOR AQUAMAN IN THIS HERE REVIEW!
Aquaman picks up awkwardly from the character’s appearance in Justice League. There’s a token mention of the battle against Steppenwolf, and Mera’s recruitment of Arthur Curry for that fight, but it feels oddly tacked-on, like the scripters felt it needed to be included because this is part of a cinematic universe. But that’s also the extent of the acknowledgment that there’s any other movie—no mention of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, or Cyborg (not even when Curry’s half-brother King Orm sends tidal waves of trash onto the coasts of the world, which you’d think that at least one of the other heroes would respond to). This movie is designed to stand completely on its own.
And it does so on the back of its incredibly simplistic plot, which is pretty much a video game or role-playing game story: Our heroes go from place to place to place, having a fight here, having to solve a puzzle there, learning bits and pieces of backstory as they go along, and finally arriving at the desired goal in order to obtain the quest item and save the day in the end. (There was one point where the incidental music—which was all over the place—sounded suspiciously like an eight-bit videogame soundtrack.)
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As expected, given his scene-stealing performance in Justice League (not to mention, y’know, his entire oeuvre), Momoa makes the movie. His relaxed charm, his obnoxiousness, his snide earnestness all keep things moving nicely. But more to the point, we never lose sight of the fact that he’s a hero.
There are few things in superhero films I have less patience with than the reluctant hero. On the one hand, yes, it gives your protagonist a journey to go on. But when you’re doing a superhero movie, the reluctant-hero trope is just tiresome, because—especially when it’s an adaptation of a character whose creation predates the attack on Pearl Harbor—we know the outcome. Aquaman rather sensibly avoids this, instead giving Curry a different journey to go on. Instead of a reluctant hero, he’s a reluctant king. Throughout the movie he resists the notion of claiming his birthright as King of Atlantis, only claiming it at the end because the alternative is his dickish half-brother.
Orm is an unsubtly evil bastard from jump, which makes it easy to root for Curry to beat him, but also makes it hard to work up much enthusiasm for any scene he’s in. This is exacerbated by a one-dimensional performance from Patrick Wilson, who spends the entire movie being out-acted by everyone around him. One expects that from the likes of Amber Heard and Willem Dafoe, but when Dolph Lundgren and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II are also acting you off the screen, you’ve got problems.
(This is the only thing I’ve seen Abdul-Mateen in, but he’s just awful as Black Manta. He’s introduced alongside Michael Beach playing his father, and Beach is a billion times the actor as the guy playing his son. Manta’s quest for vengeance against Aquaman for the death of Beach’s father character has absolutely no bite to it because Abdul-Mateen plays him so broadly and boringly. They’d have been better off casting Beach as Manta…)
It’s a good thing Momoa’s there, anyhow, because without him, this movie would be a disaster. While the overall plot follows decently enough, the details and order of events range from problematic to nonsensical. I’d been hoping that the casting of Momoa would also mean a diverse cast of Atlanteans. No such luck: All the full-blooded Atlanteans we meet who still have human form are all white folks. (Curry being a POC derives from his father, played with impressive dignity and an even more relaxed charm by Temuera Morrison.) Now you can make an argument that living underwater all this time would result in a lot of pale people—but in a flashback to thousands of years ago, when Atlantis was above the sea, and had technology greater than that of any other humans on Earth, they were still all white folks.
At least they have an excuse for why Curry has to be the one to take over from Orm, since only the “one true king” can rule. Queens need not apply, even though both Heard’s Mera and Nicole Kidman’s Atlanna (Curry’s mother) are about eight billion times more qualified to lead than any of the men around them, with the possible exception of Dafoe’s Vulko. But the patriarchy will out, it seems. Mera, however, is far more capable and intelligent than Curry, but she’s stuck helping him instead of just doing it herself. (Ditto Atlanna, who’s trapped on an island because she can’t get to the Magic Trident Of Destiny because she’s just a girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl.) Mera’s more calculating, too. When she kisses Curry right before the big fight at the end, I got no kind of romantic vibe from it—nor were we supposed to. That was a princess who was trying to a) motivate Curry to do what he had to do against Orm and b) show interest in the hopes that he would take her as his wife so she could be queen and actually run things better than the big doofus.
It would’ve been nice if some of that subtext with Mera had actually been text. As it stands, we don’t get nearly enough of an understanding of why she’s pushing so hard to get Curry to claim the throne. She states that she wants to avoid a war with the surface, and she’s willing to throw away her entire life and status to do it. But we don’t get any sense of why it’s so important to her when she doesn’t even know or like the surface world—heck, she thinks flowers are something you eat. (Not an unreasonable assumption after watching people eat fruit. And it’s a hilarious, adorable moment.) Heard does the best she can, but her character comes across far more often as a plot catalyst than a character. Having said that, she’s not just a guide—her water-manipulation powers enable her to be a true aid to Curry in his fights. She and Dafoe do a good job of showing how both Mera and Vulko are playing Orm while surreptitiously helping Curry.
Speaking of Vulko, one of the many nonsensical moments in the plot is when Orm reveals that he knew of Vulko’s betrayal all along. Yet he waits until the movie’s almost over to put him in prison? This is his closest advisor—why is he waiting until this point to arrest him for lying and helping the guy who wants to take the throne away from him? It’s meant to show that Orm isn’t a complete idiot—I guess—but it fails utterly at that.
Lundgren’s King Nereus is much more nuanced and interesting. He knows that Orm set up the “surface attack” on Atlantis—a submarine that Black Manta stole at the top of the film on Orm’s behalf in order to manufacture a conflict with the surface—but he has his own reasons. When Mera confronts her father Nereus with the revelation that the attack was fake, Lundgren plays it beautifully, as we realize that he has an agenda of his own. That one scene manages to make Nereus a more complex antagonist than all the snarling Wilson does for two hours.
The visuals are quite impressive. The undersea world is beautifully filmed and realized, director James Wan and cinematographer Don Burgess doing a superb job of creating a lush deep-sea environment. The movie is worth seeing just to see the varied underwater locales, which makes great use of the magnificence of the ocean depths to good effect.
On top of that, the surface work is good, too. The lighthouse where Curry grows up is a simple, rustic, homey location (and I love the use of the long dock that Curry’s father walks out on every morning hoping for Atlanna’s return). The Sicilian town where Curry and Mera find the location of the trident, and also where they fight Manta, is lovely. (Having said that, my wife and I recently spent two-and-a-half weeks in Italy, and seeing a town very much like the places we visited getting trashed by a superhero battle hurt my heart. Especially when Mera trashed the wine cellar…)
I also love the fact that Curry’s telepathic “speaking” to ocean life is represented by concentric circles, just like in the old SuperFriends cartoon! That was a callback I was not expecting. And in the end, Curry winds up in Aquaman’s signature orange and green, and it mostly doesn’t look doofy! (Mostly…)
This is not a great movie—it is in many ways a really dumb movie, but it’s saved by some strong performances. I didn’t even mention Nicole Kidman, in the rather thankless role of Atlanna—pretty much the same role that Michelle Pfeiffer played in Ant-Man & The Wasp, and is mothers trapped in other realms for twenty years really going to become a trope now?—who kicks some serious butt and pretty much saves the day in the end, as it’s her presence, rather than any fighting, that ends the conflict between Orm and Curry.
DC’s filmic landscape is littered with leaden, colorless crap, with now two glowing exceptions, the other being Wonder Woman, though Aquaman can’t hold a candle to the Gal Gadot film. Still, it’s nice to see another DC film that embraces fun and joy and heroism, as Curry’s goal throughout is to save people. That’s what it’s supposed to be about, after all.
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s weekly rewatch of live-action superhero movies based on comic books, “4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch,” appears every Friday on this here site. In addition to writing regularly for Tor.com, he also reviews TV shows and movies on Patreon, and writes a metric crapton of fiction as well, with three new novels coming out in 2019: the fantasy police procedural Mermaid Precinct, the urban fantasy A Furnace Sealed, and the Alien novel Isolation.
I’m noticing this “Yay-ha” thing a lot recently (because of Yahya Abdul-Mateen bringing this common Arabic name to the public eye). I suppose it’s an easy spelling error to make.
To help keep it straight, you can visualise it with an “i” as “Yahia”, and remember that the “iah” ending is in common with biblical names like Josiah and Isaiah. But don’t start pronouncing it “Ya higher” :-)
I completely agree with your review! Thank you for mentioning the awful soundtrack, it had been a while since I had heard such a weird and illogical choice of music in a film!
I had zero interest in watching the film, I avoid all DC comics films (after much insistence, I watched Wonder Woman and enjoyed it), but my sister thinks Momoa is hot, so we went to the cinema.
After watching the trailer, I thought 99% of the film’s dialogue was going to be idiotic, luckily, it was a little less (it hasn’t been the first film I have avoided because of a trailer only to find later that the movie was good, trailers should make you watch the film!). Anyway, most of the dialogue was still cheesy and they should get over curse words, they aren’t that edgy.
It surprised me how simple and basic was the plot, even so, they could have make the “fight for the throne with people with different views” more engaging (see Black Panther). Momoa’s personality makes the film watchable.
The love story was so lame and unromantic. I much prefer the idea that Mera is playing her cards to get power, although it was easier to just marry Orm. I agree that her motivation was unclear.
Also, about the video game feel, I felt that too in Wonder Woman, specially in the fight scenes. The chase over the houses in Italy actually reminded me of Prince of Persia.
Honestly, Aquaman’s parent meet cute was better than the rest of the film. Also, Nicole Kidman is looking great (although I hated the weird squeleton costume in the Lost World sequence).
I have to admit that the flower-eating moment was super cute!
I didn’t even recognise Patrick Wilson until the credits, his acting was totally off.
I agree pretty much completely with this review. It was big dumb fun, which is exactly what it needed to be.
Momoa was fantastic, which I owe to the fact that he was pretty much just playing himself. Heard, Dafoe, and Kidman were all fantastic as support characters that held the movie together, Wilson was just right for what he was asked to do in this movie, and Ma-Heen was awful (I know he’s a major Aquaman Villain, but every time he popped up on screen I just wanted to move along to anything else).
I’m also onboard that the scenes with Arthur’s parents were pretty much more emotionally touching than anything else that the movie tried to make me feel, Kidman especially sold the heart break of having to leave, and I got a little tight in the throat when Tom Curry made his way down to the dock at the end of the movie.
It didn’t ask too much of its audience, the plot was just familiar enough yet with different pieces that the current generation of movie goers will like it for what it is, the visuals were stunning (this is one of the first times I wish I had paid extra to see some of those effects in 3D), and the humor was pretty much on point the whole movie.
I’ve got my fingers crossed that WB and DC have gotten the message that not everything has to be dark and ultra serious all the time, save that for Gotham City.
Between this and Wonder Woman I’m actually starting to look forward to what’s coming out of the DC Movie side of the house.
Bring on SHAZAM!
Del: I was wondering what you were talking about, then I looked at the review, and saw that I mistyped it. Sigh. I even remember making sure to look it up and spell it right when I wrote the review, and the typo still wound up there. I blame being a fast touch-typist — my fingers automatically typed “yay” from habit. (It’s the same reason why I have to stop myself from typing our current month as DeCember, because I’m used to typing my last name…..)
Anyhow, the typo is now fixed. Yay (ahem) for the edit function!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It’s been interesting that critics either really like (Aquaman Has No Business Being This Good, The Atlantic) the movie, or really dislike (‘Aquaman’ dazzles the eye, but it’s really exhausting to watch 1.5/4 stars, The Washington Post) it.
wiredog: It’s an interesting conundrum because, on the one hand, Marvel Studios has set the bar really high for superhero films in general while, on the other, DC has set the bar incredibly low for their movies in particular (at least those not directed by Christopher Nolan or Patty Jenkins).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
My problem with the DC Universe is it’s desire to have a consistent look and feel. The dark palette and gloomy feel might carry across the movies, but somewhere along the line they have lost their sense of fun and silliness. Marvel seems to get the whole innate ridiculousness of costumed heroes and runs with it. Each movie has it’s own vibe and doesn’t try to copy another movie thematically. I haven’t seen Aquaman yet and am looking forward to it, but moving forward DC needs to lighten up and have fun with the franchise rather than try to keep everything thematically similar. I’ve always had an issue with directors choosing to make their films dark by abusing the colour palette. Harry Potter started off bright and breezy, Even with some quite dark material, but the final films were almost unwatchable in daylight. They were so dark and gloomy you needed the curtains closed and lights off to see anything. We get it, the final films aren’t a bundle of laughs, but they went too far in the other direction and filmed them like an eastern european horror movie. DC is doing the same. Gone are the bright colours and sense of fun, replaced with a look designed to say “Hey, we might be a movie about caped vigilantes, but we are serious films dagnabbit!!”
@7. Lucas
Aquaman has a pretty different feel from the majority of DC movies, it’s bright and energetic almost the whole way through. There are a few places where the color pallatte darkens up, but for the most part it takes advantage of its filming locations.
I had fun with Aquaman. The plot is pretty by the numbers, but Momoa and Co. really sell it. I also would have preferred Michael Beach as Manta. Standout moments for me is the relationship between Arthur and his dad, which I loved. The fight scenes in Italy and ont he sub were better for me than the big CG-laden final battle crossover with Pacific Rim.
Bobby
“Atlanna, who’s trapped on an island because she can’t get to the Magic Trident Of Destiny because she’s just a girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl.” — To be fair, she couldn’t get to the trident because she couldn’t talk to fish. And I actually kind of love the fact that the Aquaman ability that gets made fun of the most is the most valuable to him in the movie.
Also, every time Mera suggested he take over the throne, I imagined Arthur asking if they might want to give democracy a try.
Amber Heard sure is a breath taker.
Seriously. She’s pretty good as Mera. I enjoyed the film and its visuals. This may be the best DCEU film so far.
P.S – Saw BVS again recently. What a weird film. A Batman/Superman film whose characters bear only a faint resemblance to Batman/Superman.
“You don’t own the world a damm thing. You never did.” I nearly did a spit take when i heard that.
Indeed a very entertaining dumb movie. That’s how i also felt about Justice League. Much much better than the Superman / Batman movies and below Wonder Wonan. I did like the score though. Especially the synth bits. When Aquaman first enters Atlantis. Very cool sci-fi like vibe. The (cover)songs were pretty awfull. Now let’s hope DC will make a fantastic Green Lantern (Corps) movie! …..(sigh)…
This might be a lark… what, two and a half hours long?! Nuts to that.
Top two things that really irritated me about this film: .1) they make a point of having the dialogue state how Curry and Mera were lostl/ had no way to get out of the desert…..then POOF they were out. I get the whole “movie magic” thing, but don’t make such a point of the problem if you then aren’t going to address it . 2) when the marble plinth fell on the guy in Italy, and Curry used his super strength to lift it off of the screaming individual…… The man then got up and sprinted off like he didn’t even have a scratch. There’s a limit to the suspension of disbelief….. He was just screaming from having a marble pillar dropped across his torso and legs. At least give the guy a limp, for goodness sake.
It was goofy fun and I enjoyed it.
One of my favorite bits is them actually addressing Arthur’s decision to leave pre-Manta & his father behind on the sub and the consequences of that choice. Yes, the pirates were scum & Manta is a big giant hypocrite, but that doesn’t automatically make what Arthur did ok.
I will have to disagree, krad. Aquaman could have been fun, and certainly has fun parts, but it’s too damn bloody long. And it’s too dumb even for itself, making the two hours twenty minutes feel like a chore. Every single plot beat is predictable. The jokes are all over the place, badly placed, very stupid, and while I can accept this Aquaman has a different personality than the comics character, Momoa’s yelling, grunting underwater barbarian bro grows tiresome, even if I love Momoa.
The romance between Aquaman and Mera feels completely forced, only there because they’re a couple in the comics. And while Orm is a passable villain for the first 80% of the film, in the last 20% he becomes completely cartoony and cackling, even his armor looks cheap and stupid.
Visually, it’s beautiful (I love the soldier armors and Black Manta is comic-perfect), and it has some great action scenes… though I’ll never understand why Mera doesn’t kill the pursuing Atlantean commandos in Italy by manipulating the water inside their armors… How is Black Manta able to heavily modify Atlantean technology he’d never seen before in like, two days?
What is up with his telepathy coming out of his hand? And how incongrous is to have the underwater kingdoms celebrate Arthur’s victory when he probably just massacred dozens if not hundreds of them?
Arthur and the Karathe steamroll over the armies, his controlled sea creatures turn on their riders, etc. It’s the same kind of destruction caused by heroes that people complain about with Man Of Steel.
I do give it credit for resolving the Karathe scene (dude, that’s JULIE FREAKING ANDREWS voicing it) by Arthur talking to it.
One thing: not all human-form Atlanteans are white. Murk is played Asian actor, and while he’s a bit exotic-looking (the character, I mean), he still looks pretty human.
@2 – palindrome310: Yes, the Tom Curry / Atlanna romance montage is much better than the rest of the film.
@9 – Bobby: Yes, the submarine and Sicily scenes were the best action sequences.
Not a bad film, not a great one either…Incidentally the use of concentric circles to represent Aquaman’s telepathy was also used in the 1960’s cartoon, predating SuperFriends…Not sure if it was an effect originating earlier in the comics..
Thanks for sharing!
Coming late to the party, but here are some thoughts:
About Atlanteans being white: The Atlanteans had some legitimate reasons to be upset with the surface dwellers, but they were also being shown as racist. Having them shown as one race helped underscore it when they insulted Arthur for being a half-breed and let us see Arthur was racially different from them (even if there’s no reason we saw that the Atlanteans wouldn’t have treated Arthur the same way no matter what kind of surface dweller his father was).
Mera: From the bit Mera said about Atlanna, I gathered she saw her as a mentor and role model. Mera might have had issues with surface dwellers, but they stopped way short of condoning the deaths of millions or even billions.
Mera acted insulted when Arthur suggested she not go through with an arranged marriage. She saw it as a responsibility she wasn’t going to back down from.
I think she initially tracked down Arthur out of that same sense of responsibility. She was carrying out what Atlanna wanted and helping Atlanna’s son. She may have come to like Arthur by the end, but I think she was still primarily motivated not by power or love. To be a good king–to help Atlanna’s people–Arthur is going to need Mera, and she knows it. Responsibility is what I see as her motivating force.
Side issue: For Mera, Atlanna was killed for political reasons and because Atlantis would punish the queen for treason when she disagrees with the man who is only king by his marriage to her. Mera disagrees with that and supports her mentor’s vision. For Orm, his mother chose to die for his half-brother. In a way, I think he saw it as a betrayalm that she loved Arthur more than him.
On Atlanna and the trident: Atlanna may not have been able to get the trident but she was able to survive multiple attempts, something the skeletons around it didn’t manage.
On Black Manta: Beach would have been better. I also think having the scenario play out the same way but with his son trapped and dying instead of him would have been more painful. Angst is always a plus in my book.