starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Patrick Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison, Randall Park, Michael Beach and...
directed by James Wan
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I know this movie came out about four weeks ago, but if you want to give me shit about timeliness, I'd like to point out that it took 77 years to even get a goddamned Aquaman movie made. This entire enterprise is an exercise in studied tardiness and they made a billion goddamned dollars. I assume the payoff for me will be whatever the equivalent of a billion dollars is for a blog published for free that generates no revenue. The right to get up and go to my day job again tomorrow, I suppose.
Happily, I don't have to put a cranky SPOILER WARNING at the beginning of this one because I can't think of a single thing I could possibly spoil for you in this movie. It's Aquaman for god's sake. We've already seen him do all the shit he can do, played by the same exact dude, in a whole other movie already. Does he breathe underwater? You know he does. Does he talk to fish? You know he does. Does he ever put on that goofy-ass orange shirt with the little scales on it? IT'S IN EVERY POSTER AND EVERY TRAILER, YOU KNOW THAT HE DOES.
Not only is the character, as a general premise and in the Momoa incarnation, so well established at this point there are no real story-beat surprises left to be had, but I don't know that I've ever seen a marketing strategy so absolutely determined to give you everything worth having out of this film prior to its release. To hear cast and production crew tell it, working on a Star Wars film these days is like working in a CIA field station in Prague in like 1958. Scripts are nodded at or hinted about, but never addressed directly. They're carried around in microfilm rolls stuff in the hollowed out molars of production assistants, watched all the time by elite Disney snipers armed exactly how you'd imagine a Disney sniper would be armed: with 3D-rendered cartoon guns with oversized, human eyes and tragically dead parents and zippy purple bullets with little wings that will kill you around corners if they have to.
By contrast on Aquaman, the pre-release strategy seemed to be to show the entire movie in disjointed bits, offering everything short of a handjob to guarantee you buy a ticket. A few weeks before it came out they offered a five-plus minute clip that included the best parts of a bravura action set-piece featuring some genuinely impressive staging, choreography and editing and a maybe the most comic-book of all comic-book villain reveals in the history of comic-book films. That settled some of my apprehensions about the movie before it came out, but as I waited with impatient irritation for the same sequence to play out in the context of the film, where I should have been enthralled, I was mildly grumpy. I guess maybe the idea was to promise if we liked that, there was more where that came from! Except really everything available publicly was basically just the good action minus the exposition, so there... wasn't really. Unless you count Temuera Morrison's tooth caps. Which I fucking do.
Aquaman is dumb. Yes, I mean the movie, but also I mean the character as an idea. He's been the butt of jokes for almost his entire existence. My primary understanding of the character was installed watching the writers of Super Friends struggle to find something sea-related he might do in relation to an otherwise extraordinarily landed plot. That was also my first great education in awareness of the meta, the abstraction of writing, clanging me right between the eyes in a flash every time the plot for no reason maneuvered, with great and obvious labor, some lesser-powered Super Friend into position to fall out of a fucking boat before the dénouement.
There are some passing swipes at an environmental message about ocean stewardship, fine. But while the film overall is studiously un-serious, it is also neither winking nor cringing, with neither apology nor defensiveness. It tells its dumb story with its feet planted, shoulders back, broad and shapely chest forward and somehow arrives at... charming. Disarming. Sweet, even. Don't misunderstand, Jason Momoa bros the fuck out of it, so much that you assume he achieves his supersonic swimming speeds by making a mighty propeller action with his dick. But it also manages to be a movie about a sad boy who lost his mommy. It's a superhero story cliche, to be sure, but when he rages or he pushes back against emotional truths or just acts like a douchey beach-rat, you do kinda get it. Plus he's got a body put together out of steel cabling, burnt honey and those squeezy things you use to improve your grip strength. I can't stay mad at him.
The only times the character lapses into uninteresting buffoonery is when he's paired with Amber Heard's Mera, who is given the thankless task female characters are usually given of kicking the exasperatingly ADHD protagonist in the ass over and over again to keep him on mission and moving the plot forward. It doesn't really help that someone decided Aquaman and Mera should converse in something akin to banter, which neither the actors nor writers seem particularly up to. Mostly she's forced to be the nagging adult, which does her a great frustrating disservice, because I'd say in the sequences where they are allowed to stop talking and start punching stuff, she's a capable and interesting physical hero. She comes with a cool power set differentiated from our title character to the point I was almost more interested in watching what she could do than Aquaman himself. She was a female secondary character who, if I remember right, never, ever needs saving.
James Wan and the rest of the production team made exactly the right choices when it came to the look and tone of the piece. You've got Atlanteans, for god's sake. The actors and director lean in to the lunatic scale of the thing, from the gonzo color palette to the scenery-chewing, especially the shouty-mad Patrick Wilson and the growly-mad Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Ocean Master and Black Manta, respectively. The plinky 1980s synth score is even unapologetically cheese-ball to the point I couldn't help but be tickled by it.
This film is not going to solve anything for you. It's a shame I guess because a lot of bullshit needs some solving at the minute, but we also need some noisy, pretty distraction. Aquaman is maybe about 20 minutes more of that than it needs to be, but it still works as designed. There are people in it who have the power to swim so fast they cause some kind of sonic boomlet cavitation in the water as they go AND YET for some reason still ride on the backs of giant sea-horses. It delivers exactly what it promises.
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