Arthur (Jason Momoa) is the son of the escaped queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman) and a lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison). She returns to Atlantis to keep her son safe, and he mopes about it, except when he’s in secret training montages with Willem Dafoe, who I suppose I should give a character name, but he’s just playing low-energy Willem Dafoe. Then there’s some stuff about pirates and a guy who will become the super-villain Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) but it doesn’t matter and could/should have been cut from the film. Enter Mera (Amber Heard), super water-sorceress who could easily have solved all the problems if she’d bothered to do so, but instead goes to enlist Arthur to fight his non-descript brother King Orm (Patrick Wilson) who’s planning on attacking the surface world. Then apparently someone got confused and slipped in some Tomb Raider script pages as Arthur and Mera travel around the world to find ancient treasure until they find the proper script pages and it all ends in a big fight involving men on sharks with lasers.
There are men on sharks with lasers (punctuation intentionally missing). That should be a riot. How much fun are men on sharks with lasers? And dinosaurs? And seahorse mounts? This is dumb stuff, but fun. How can you fail to make a fun picture with men on sharks with lasers? For a start, they should have actually spent some time showing us the MEN ON SHARKS WITH LASERS instead of repeatedly whipping past them or keeping them in the indistinct background.
They needed to decide what kind of film they wanted to make. Is it a light hearted comedy adventure film? Occasionally, and those bits work best. But then it wants to be a deeply serious epic film. Then it wants to be a romantic comedy. Then an angry revenge picture. The tone flips are startling, though less so then they’d have been if they’d ever nailed any tone. The worst tone dissonance comes from the music, which is mindboggling. How did any composer write this and why the hell did any producer OK the film for distribution without demanding a re-score? The music shifts from the overly serious choral (nothing short of Masada could handle it), to epic adventure symphonic, to electronica, to goofy, to light piano, to retro rock, to hip hop. Maybe they didn’t actually have music written and faked the composer’s name and just left in the temp tracks they’d stolen from random films for editing. It’s distracting. One scene shifts musical genres four times.
If you can somehow get past that, it still doesn’t work. Villains matter in a superhero flick, and King Orm is bad even when compared against other DCEU villains. Yes, he’s worse than The Enchantress. Yes he’s worse than twitchy Lex Luthor. How can I say that? Specifically because I can say I hated Jesse Eisenberg’s performance; that means there was a performance. There’s something to hate. With Orm (and Wilson) there’s nothing. There is a great empty void where a villain should be. Being terrible is better than being nonexistent. Wilson doesn’t even embarrass himself because you won’t remember him.
Surprisingly, the best element in the film is Momoa. Acting is not his strong suit, but he’s a big, amiable bear of a man, and when he can just be himself, he’s fun (remember I mentioned how this film should be fun). If they’d have let Amber Heard relax, then the two of them might have managed to save this thing. There’s some cute interplay between them that should have been the whole film and shows what could have been. Nicole Kidman isn’t good, but she’s not bad, making her the third best thing about Aquaman. Faint praise.
With all those problems, a weak plot (I didn’t like it as a comic or when they made into the animated Throne of Atlantis), and no continuity (there’s no way to fit Arthur’s undersea actions from Justice League into this film’s world and make the characters make sense), it’s only saving grace would be bright, fun, amazing world building. No luck there either. There’s just no artistry behind the art design and no skill with the lighting. The film is muddy. Nothing looks epic or even pretty. Atlantis has a drab murk over it. It’s worse when they pop up in the dessert and Rome, which don’t look impressive, but do look competent. It’s the only time when the lighting and contrast are close to what they should be, making it clear someone wasn’t paying attention the rest of the time. Aquaman should have at least been pretty, but it isn’t. Compare it to another film with multiple failings: Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. There, the foreground might not have anything worth seeing, but the cityscapes were amazing. Here, there’s nothing but murk.
I didn’t hate Aquaman, and for the DCEU, that’s some kind of victory, so I’ll be generous and give it Two Reels, but a low Two Reels.
The other DCEU films are Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016), Wonder Woman (2017), Justice League (2017)