An adventure that’s too flubbledy-blubbledy by half
Aquaman 12A cert, 143 min ★★★★★ Dir James Wan
Starring: Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Yahya Abdul-mateen II, Dolph Lundgren, Temuera Morrison, Julie Andrews
Back in 2005, the comedy series
Entourage turned an entire season into a running gag about a blockbuster adaptation of Aquaman, which became an improbable hit despite its lead character’s lowly pop-culture status.
Thirteen years later, the DC Comics sea-lister is no joke – at least not at Warner Bros post-justice League, who have put responsibility for restoring the DC franchise to cruising speed on his beefy, brine-chapped shoulders. A film you sense would have worked best as a flashy, froth-tossed romp feels lumpily overburdened, and pulled in all directions by vying tides.
Aquaman tries its hand at everything it can grab: sombre muscleman pageantry, odd-couple high jinks, kitschy Power Rangers rubber-suit combat, abyssal Lovecraftian terror (flagged up by a conspicuously placed copy of The
Dunwich Horror in the prologue), even sweeping, Avatar-style bioluminescent bedazzlement. But it’s put together with so little consistency that even individual shots look like their parts have been thumbed together like bits from mismatched jigsaws.
This is a pity, because Aquaman himself – aka Arthur Curry, played by Game of Thrones’ Jason Momoa – is the only character in the current DC line-up, aside from Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, who pulls off the timehonoured Marvel Studios trick of having a personality that’s appealing, easy to grasp and comes over loud and clear in either large or small doses. In this case, he’s deep-sea royalty raised on land as a dopey meathead, after his mother Atlanna, Queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman) shacks up with a bit of surface-dwelling rough. At the start of the film, Kidman is literally washed up, but a friendly lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison) hauls her indoors and nurses her back to health.
Years pass, and Arthur is summoned home by Princess Mera (Amber Heard), in the hope he can overthrow his pure-blood brother King Orm (Patrick Wilson), who is agitating for war on humankind. There ensues a fantastically dull extended section of courtly jostling, until Arthur and Mera are cast out of the kingdom and embark on a globetrotting caper to find a magical trident that will restore peace to the deep. It’s The Phantom Menace one minute, Romancing the Stone the next, and director James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring) does his best to play to each section’s very different strengths. But the Atlantis scenes are mostly a Star Wars prequel-level cringe – both for the overload of bland digital nothingscapes and the inescapable silliness of watching characters talking to each other about very serious matters of state, but underwater, with all the dialogue overdubbed with flubbledy-blubbledy sound effects.
The stuff on land is snappier, not least because the film’s villain-on-theside, vengeful pirate Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-mateen II), has such a snazzy costume – though Momoa and Heard rarely connect as actors across the green-screen void, and the storytelling bears the scars of the copy and paste keys. There is a limit to the number of times a film can shunt its plot onwards by having baddies appear out of nowhere and blow up a wall. Yet during a climactic plummet into the abyss, Wan and his team suddenly go into imaginative overdrive, with shoals of gibbering, crustaceous horrors and a giant hermit crab with the voice of Julie Andrews, who opted not to appear in Mary Poppins Returns, but seemingly made time for this.
“No man has ever freed the trident from Atlan’s grip,” she rasps, waggling various needly appendages for emphasis. Sadly, neither have Momoa, Wan and co: for all its sporadic wackiness and wonder, on balance Aquaman still comes out a bore. But they’ve given it a heroic shake.