Swims into new frontier
Don’t miss it! A muchderided superhero finally wins some respect with this film Review
Superheroes who travel by sea horse never get any respect. Since Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger first dreamed him up in 1941, Aquaman’s fate has largely been as the Rodney Dangerfield of DC Comics — a regular punchline for his not-so-potent powers.
Yet Aquaman’s day has finally arrived. And if there was one inspired stroke behind the first solo movie for the Atlantis hero, it was in casting Jason Momoa in the Justice League role, one he begun in 2016’s Batman v Superman. It’s almost a dare: Try telling this guy your Aquaman jokes.
In James Wan’s waterlogged, fitfully entertaining Aquaman, a heavy metal guitar riff blares at our first close-up of the long-haired, much-tattooed, shirtless Momoa. “Permission to come aboard?” he says with a sly, over-the-shoulder grin.
It’s a welcome arrival. As Momoa showed on his recent Saturday Night Live hosting gig, his charisma is as formidable as his brawn. So why is Aquaman so soggy with Atlantis mythology and drowning in special effects when all it really needs to do is let Momoa’s Aquaman rock?
There are pleasures in Wan’s extravagant underwater pageant. It’s surely the only movie around where you can enjoy a floating Willem Dafoe (as Vulko, royal counsellor to Atlantis ruler Orm, played by Patrick Wilson), see a gladiatorial showdown sounded by an octopus on drums and, in one of the many scenes where water is weaponised, witness death by Chianti, in a tussle that tumbles into a Sicilian wine store.
Aquaman weighs in somewhere between the lugubrious Justice League and the less leaden Wonder Woman on the uneven scales of recent DC films. To both the movie’s benefit and detriment, the seas here are choppier than in the predictably (and sometimes boringly) smooth sailing of a Marvel movie. But the bright spots (Momoa, that octopus) can be difficult to really relish amid the oceans of exposition and a typically pulverising, overelaborate screenplay.
A war is brewing underwater, but David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall’s script takes a while to get us there. They have origin stories to map out, beginning with Atlanna, the banished Atlantis princess (Nicole Kidman), washing up on the rocky Maine shores of a lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison). They fall in love and have a child named Arthur (our Aquaman to be) before Atlanna is forced to return to the sea.
As an adult, Arthur — trained by Vulko as a kid — moonlights as a hero in between happy-hour trips to the bar. But he’s reluctantly drawn into a struggle for the throne Jason Momoa. of the seven seas with his younger brother Orm, who’s plotting a battle with “surface dwellers.”
The red-haired Xebel princess Mera (Amber Heard), herself a formidable fighter, joins with Arthur on a globe-trotting mission to save Atlantis and prevent war by finding a sacred trident.
Wan, the director of the Saw franchise and Furious 7, deserves both criticism for soaking the film so thoroughly in kitschy CGI and praise for the glowing synthetic beauty of Atlantis. The movie zips along too quickly before we get much more than a floatover view of Atlantis. But in almost Tron-like contours of luminous neon, Atlantis is a cinema world well built, at least on the outside. But the movie’s only truly visually stunning sequence is a deep-sea chase lit by a lone flare while hordes of frightful creatures close in.
But both Wan and Momoa have a surprisingly firm grasp of who Aquaman is, and they ultimately — more than two hours later — steer their film toward sincerity and away from bombast.