In epic ‘Aquaman,’ the waters run deep
In “Justice League,” Aquaman drank, met up with some superfriends, surfed on the Batmobile and saved the world. Jason Momoa’s swimtastic super-dude has his own solo movie now, drinking and still needing to come to the world’s aid, but definitely leaning into that “solo” part.
“He doesn’t give a (crap) about the world,” says James Wan, director of “Aquaman” (in theaters Friday), about his hero when the movie opens. “Here he is, half surface dweller, half Atlantean, and he doesn’t feel like he fits into either world, so he marches to the drums of his own beat and doesn’t really care about anyone else.”
A buff loner sitting in a bar for two hours doesn’t make for a very good bigscreen adventure for a DC Comics icon, though. So Wan promises that Aquaman does rise to the occasion – in his case, figuring out what it means to be king and what it takes to be a hero – in addition to flirting with ally/love interest Mera (Amber Heard), battling halfbrother King Orm (Patrick Wilson), and sharing the screen with all sorts of crazy cool sea life.
Just don’t expect to see a lot of other do-gooders in this standalone episode. “It would’ve been really weird to see Flash in Atlantis,” Wan says with a hearty laugh.
Here’s a viewer’s guide to DC’s latest superhero effort.
Aquaman’s got a big heart under those sizable pecs.
Arthur’s a no-nonsense warrior who’s very close with his dad (Temuera Morrison) and is somewhat reluctantly on a path toward his true destiny, yet is also a guy who’s unafraid of saying he’s afraid.
Momoa “brings obviously a lot of muscularity, and I don’t just mean that in the way he looks,” Wan says. “We all know he can do the big tough guy role (but) he can be sensitive and he can be funny and he can be goofy. I didn’t want Jason to become Aquaman; I wanted Aquaman to become Jason.”
The movie’s a not-so-secret romantic comedy.
Wan infused “Aquaman” with action, adventure, family drama and even some horror. However, there is love and lightness in the growing relationship between Arthur and Mera, an Atlantean princess chosen to be Orm’s bride, that’s “really refreshing,” Heard says. And the coupling of Arthur’s father Tom and mother Queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) “is that classic maritime story of a sailor finding and falling in love with a mermaid,” Wan says. “I love that kind of stuff. I try to sneak it into all my movies.” Adds Wilson: “(Wan) doesn’t go for easy so he doesn’t want just boy meets girl. That’s not his vibe, but he’s very much leading with his heart on this one.”
Wearing CGI princess gowns has its ups and downs.
Mera has her green-tinged actionhero garb and sports a royal ensemble with seashells and jellyfish accoutrements.“I’m wearing like basically stretchy green-screen (material) as pants that they made into leggings on the bottom and then that kind of bejeweled top. It was a very strange way to walk around for a couple of days, I’m not gonna lie,” Heard says, adding that “Aquaman” had “more green screen than I’ve ever seen.”
But it’s really fun to ride make-believe sea animals.
Some characters ride seahorses, others honcho sharks. Orm’s royal steed is a prehistoric crocodile called a tylosaur that, for Wilson, was pretty much like getting on a mechanical bull. “I love riding horses, so whenever they would say, ‘And then you pull back on the reins!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, you don’t really pull back on the reins. You pull back, he’s stopping.’ And then of course James is like, ‘Um, this is a fake animal that you’re riding. It’s not real, you know that, right?’ ”
A lot of thinking went into underwater chats.
Wilson has a spoiler alert for you: “Humans can’t breathe underwater so you can’t actually talk underwater. Yes, sure, you can, but we’d see all the bubbles.” In addition to designing the sprawling kingdom of Atlantis, “acoustically the world needed to sound like its own special place,” Wan says. So he took care in editing and sound mixing to figure out how the water would affect characters’ dialogue in the sea, without it being too much of a distraction for audiences. “I realized that if I hit it stronger at the start of the scene and (then) let the characters do their thing, I slowly start to back away from it and it becomes normal after a while,” Wan says.