Water World
AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM James Wan doubles down on spectacle and scares…
Istarted photography a month ago,” grins James Wan on Zoom. “And in the spirit of doing something a bit different, I’m constantly trying to find stuff that we haven’t seen before, so I’m not repeating what I’ve done from the first film. I know the stuff people liked about it, so I’m definitely keeping that, but I’m trying to find different visuals.”
An Aquaman sequel was always going to happen when the first film became the only DCEU movie to make a billion-dollar splash – $1,148,485,886, to be precise. Wan signed on to produce, and original scriptwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick got scribbling. Delighted with the result, Wan confirmed, in August 2020, that he would also return to direct, and in June this year revealed the title to be Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom via an Instagram snap. But until now, further details have been as silent as an ocean grave, so what can he tells us?
“Aquaman 2 is very heavily inspired by Planet Of The Vampires,” he beams. Given that this 1965 space adventure by Italian genre maestro Mario Bava
is a camp classic that also rustles up oodles of dread as it pits the crew of a spaceship against alien vampires (!), this suggests that Wan is ready to lean into the garishly lensed spectacle of the first film… and the horror of the masterful sequence set in the Trench.
“You can take the boy out of horror but you can never take the horror out the boy,” laughs the director, who has Saw, the first two Conjuring movies and the first two Insidious films on his expanding CV. “Well, the first movie took a lot of people by surprise, right?
And that’s partially because they were not familiar with the comic book, which deals in this very lurid, strange world. People were taken aback that I didn’t throw all that stuff away and make a dark, heavy film. But I didn’t feel that would have been right for it. So with the second film, I feel it will be easier for people to accept where we go because I’ve already laid the foundation.”
With Jason Momoa returning as Arthur Curry/Aquaman, and Amber Heard again by his side as Queen Mera (also returning, on villain duties, are Patrick Wilson as Arthur’s half-brother Orm Marius and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as high-seas mercenary Black Manta), Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom promises to expand the world-building as it explores several underwater kingdoms. But it will also drip-feed themes that are deadly serious.
“This movie plays with what has been happening around the world with our environment,” explains Wan. “With each passing year, it seems our planet is spiralling worse and worse.” Brace for another big splash. JG
ETA | 16 DECEMBER 2022 / AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM WILL BE RELEASED NEXT YEAR.