Aquaman certainly isn’t a great movie but it’s exactly what a superhero film should be: a surprisingly pleasant escape from reality for a little over two hours.
A year ago, the tone of the DC Extended Universe could be summed up as dark, gloomy, and almost humorless. Films like 2013’s Man of Steel and 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice had established the superhero film series as the polar opposite of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. After 2017’s heavily flawed Justice League attempted to take the series in a lighter, more humorous direction and met with commercial disappointment, many wondered if the DCEU was dead in the water.
Although we’ve met Aquaman (Jason Momoa), the character, in prior DCEU movies, Aquaman, the movie, does not require you to have seen any of the previous films. Effectively, this is a soft reboot of the DCEU that establishes a new tone while maintaining at least some of the continuity established in the earlier films. What that means, however, is that the script by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall is extremely heavy on expositional dialogue. In fact, there are at least four scenes where characters breathlessly explain past events in an attempt to offer a coherence to the goings-on.
I won’t even try to summarize the plot of Aquaman other than to say that it offers up an origin story while also orchestrating a war between the seven hidden kingdoms of sea and surface-dwelling humans. There are so many machinations at play during the film’s two-hour and twenty-three minute running time that I actually stopped trying to follow everything after about an hour. Nevertheless, the core story is extremely predictable. Disconnecting my brain allowed me to focus on James Wan’s frenetic direction and the absurd amount of CGI present in every scene.
Without exaggeration, I can’t recall a single scene in Aquaman that doesn’t seem to have at least some form of artificial visual enhancement. From the quaint lighthouse that Aquaman’s human father (Temuera Morrison) lives in to the gigantic Atlantean cities under the sea, every backdrop looks to have been built out of pixels. Early scenes feature Morrison and Nicole Kidman digitally de-aged to look as they did in 1985. Later on, Amber Heard wears a dress made from jellyfish. Soldiers ride giant seahorses and great white sharks into battle. Hell, an octopus plays drums as a prelude to a fight scene in the second act.
However, what emerges from all the visual noise is a likable, if absolutely ridiculous, superhero film. Jason Momoa plays every scene with a self-assured swagger that somehow doesn’t come off as obnoxious. Who would have thought Aquaman, a superhero that talks to fish, could be such an alpha male? Stranger still, who would have thought that the combination would work? Seeing the likes of Willem Dafoe, Nicole Kidman, Patrick Wilson and Dolph Lundgren sharing the screen while spouting some of the most inane dialogue of their careers is at once hilarious and oddly charming.
Aquaman certainly isn’t a great movie but it’s exactly what a superhero film should be: over-the-top, entertaining, and a surprisingly pleasant escape from reality for a little over two hours. If this film is any sign of the new direction of the DC Extended Universe, I’m looking forward to the next entry, Shazam!, much more than I was just a few hours ago.
3.5 out of 5.0 stars
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