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Aquaman
Starring: Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe
Director: James Wan
Genre: Superhero
Rating: PG-13
RUNTIME: 143 Mins
In their zeal to catch up with Marvel, DC and Warner Bros. plunged into the super-team waters before establishing individual building blocks, creating a high degree of difficulty. While not on par with Wonder Woman, Aquaman is a step toward restoring equilibrium, creating a sprawling undersea world that most closely resembles the Thor franchise in terms of scope, majesty and happily, humour.
One thing that is heartily recommended to bring into the cinema screen, aside from the largest tub of popcorn you can find, is a seatbelt.
Because not only does the latest entry in the DC Extended Universe clock in at an over-extended 2 hours and 23 minutes, it throws everything at us except an undersea kitchen sink. You need to be strapped in!
Anchored in the submerged citadel of Atlantis, Aquaman offers up wave after wave of heroes and villains, plots and counterplots, climaxes, anti-climaxes and CGI creatures, like a whole season of vintage Star Trek stuffed into one film.
That cover-the-waterfront attitude also extends to the casting. If anyone ever imagined seeing a superhero film where the supporting players include Nicole Kidman and Dolph Lundgren, Willem Dafoe and Temuera Morrison, not to mention the digitally altered voice of Julie Andrews as a sea creature, this is the dream they dreamt.
It’s almost as if director James Wan and his extensive team of screenwriters feared this would be their only shot at making an Aquaman movie and shoehorned every last idea they had into the mix.
This usually ends up as a sure-fire recipe for sinking rather than swimming, but somehow, it mostly works.
Notwithstanding the inevitable formulaic dialogue and a tsunami of slick action sequences, Aquaman turns out to be, almost despite itself, an engaging undersea extravaganza.
Before the maelstrom of madness kicks in, we’re introduced to the titular scaled superhero in a now-familiar expositional origins sequence.
The movie starts with the story of how Aquaman’s lighthouse keeper father, Tom Curry (Morrison), came to find and rescue his mother, Atlanna (Kidman), queen of Atlantis.
This meet leads to love and to the birth of son Arthur, the future Aquaman, but to keep the boy and his father safe, Atlanna returns home. Though she says she will return, the boy grows to manhood without ever seeing her again.
After a rocky childhood (a scene of his unique communication with fishes in the Boston Aquarium is especially good), Arthur grows up to be a kind of freelance superhero, rescuing folks when it suits him and drinking when it doesn’t.
A battle against nautical pirates at the film’s opening turns out to have a lasting negative effect: One of the vanquished eventually becomes sworn enemy Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen).
Meanwhile, under the sea, Aquaman’s conniving half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) is ruling Atlantis and, in combination with Nereus (Lundgren), is plotting to unite all the undersea tribes and declare war on the surface, payback for all the years of crass pollution of the oceans.
This disturbs Vulko (Dafoe), a top Atlantean adviser, as well as Mera, and she shows up unannounced to convince Aquaman that he should return home and, as the eldest son of the queen, claim the throne that is his birthright.
Aquaman, however, is unsure. Not only is responsibility not his thing, he is acutely conscious of his status as what King Orm dismissively calls a half-breed.
As always these days, the movie is determined to convey positive messages about the virtues of inclusion and the need to clean up the planet.
The casting of Game of Thrones alumnus Jason Momoa is inspired, with the tattooed titan able to switch between fierce and funny on a whim. He’s capable of holding a trident like he means business as well as delivering a string of verbal zingers: “I’m missing happy hour for this,” he cracks when a rescue mission runs long.
Amber Heard also made a brief appearance as the flame-haired Mera in the Justice League film, and she convincingly turns that Atlantean princess into Aquaman’s equal partner in derring-do, with the pair’s on-screen rapport becoming one of the production’s pluses.
Aquaman’s other major success is the creation of Atlantis and environs. Quite frankly: it deserves to be seen on the big screen.
It’s not just the great sense of underwater spectacle it portrays, complete with immense ancient statues and sea horses that really live up to the name, it’s that the effects make you believe the characters are actually living and breathing under the sea – even though filming on sound stages with wires and rigs was the order of the day.
When it comes to the actual plot all these people are swimming in, it is mostly acceptable if not particularly original – familiar elements like a treasure map to be followed and an Arthurian sword-in-the-stone motif find their place.
When you throw in some emotional surprises, that’s a lot of boat for one movie to float, but float is what Aquaman manages to do. Wan’s geeky epic is chock-full of ridiculous elements and, on paper, it really shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it’s all so inherently weird and brazenly bonkers that the siren call of this giddy, otherworldly romp is hard to resist.
Now showing in: Cineco, Seef II, Juffair Oasis, Saar, Wadi Al Sail, Avenues
Kristian’s verdict: 4/5
