Aquaman (James Wan)

[Dukefrukem]

[Dukefrukem]

No one saw this yet?

[Mal]

I went into this being optimistic but also totally green to the character and very much prepared for Justice League 2.0. It's a humongous spectacle on the visual level, with CGI that made me think of Valerian numerous times (I'd say I even enjoyed this more than Valerian too). The story behind it though is nothing remarkable, but since its an origin story, I'll give it a pass in that regard. Momoa himself grunts and winks to the camera; for me, he's one of the least interesting performers in a stacked cast but thats not a bad thing. Having other characters do the talking (Amber Heard specifically, who really runs the show) gives us as viewers more to invest in (Dolph Lundgren gets a lot more to do here than Creed II!). This is all about the adventure and action, which is some of the best stuff from the DCEU so far (and I'll say, there are moments here that even Marvel would be happy to have in one of their features). Goofy humor (as long as its earned) is a trait that I favor in my comic-book films - its why I enjoy the Ant-Man movies over the likes of Thor and Captain America. Aquaman and Mera get a lot of time to build rapport on their journey, and when the final battle comes, we buy their choices, feelings for one another. On the negative, a few key side characters are one-note. The context of the beginning action piece felt a little rocky and off for me (I'll chalk this up to me mostly having zero clue about Aquaman's universe). But I left the theater happy and compelled to see this one again. Some of my favorite moments in this film are moments that a lesser director would fumble or feel that they wouldn't need a lot of care, but James Wan's ability to make every action sequence clear, crisp- and have these sequences breathe through the editing is something I applaud.

[Dukefrukem]

Does this take place before or after JL?

[Mal]

Does this take place before or after JL?

After and its only referenced in one brief line. It does have some flashbacks to how Arthur's parents met and his training too.

[Skitch]

Does this take place before or after JL?

Mamoa said in an interview that Snyder's cut of JL ended with him on his way to the beginning of this film, almost like a few days or weeks later.

[Dead & Messed Up]

This movie isn't sure of what it's doing for maybe 45 minutes to an hour, and you can tell as you watch it race through its exposition and have characters declare and re-declare their intentions and motivations (sometimes with conviction, often because the plot requires it), and then at some point - probably when they escape Orm to retrieve the Trident - it finds its footing (sea legs? (I'm so sorry)) as a globe-trotting romp, climaxing with some abyssal nightmares that would make Guillermo del Toro cheer, and ending with a surprising amount of grace and forgiveness.

What really got me emotional, bizarrely, was how the film takes Lovecraftian tropes and anxieties and flips them completely on their head and finds something positive and humane and liberating and fucking thrilling.

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Not for nothing that this movie hinges on a Lovecraftian "deep one" a la Cthulhu or Dagon threatening Arthur and dismissing him as a "half-breed mongrel"... and then pays that off later when the Cyclopean beast and the mongrel work together for peace. I've been reading Lovecraft pretty much since I was a teen, and over the years, it's been progressively difficult to reconcile his dark imagination (which drew me in originally) with his xenophobia and racism (which becomes clearer and more endemic to the work over time). Seeing a movie take the best parts of his work and completely twist them into something this energetic and hopeful was mind-boggling and oddly sort of beautiful to me.

]

It's definitely worth seeing on a big screen for the kooky Silver Age Greek-Art-Noveau Buck Rogers vistas, although I wish Wan held on those images a little longer.

Wonder Woman is probably the best of the current DC movie crop, but this movie's imagination and late-breaking story beats captured my attention and, God help me, parts of my heart.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Also really dug how

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no one significant dies at the end. As long as the story told is a good one, and the ethical stakes are clear, you don't need to kill people to achieve dramatic culmination/payoff.

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[Mal]

Also really dug how

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no one significant dies at the end. As long as the story told is a good one, and the ethical stakes are clear, you don't need to kill people to achieve dramatic culmination/payoff.

]

same.

[Ivan Drago]

I did kinda dose off during the exposition dump of a first act, but otherwise, this made me feel like everyone's thought process was that the source material was so ridiculous to pull off in a live-action tentpole, that they just went the extra mile to make everything in it as fun as humanly possible. Everything feels wondrous and grand in spectacle in the city of Atlantis and everywhere underwater, but watching Aquaman fight all the men after him and Black Manta looks reminiscent of live-action He-Man in an episode of ocean-themed Power Rangers. But it's wildly entertaining from beginning to end thanks to the awesome action sequences, dynamic visuals, and good chemistry between Jason Momoa and Amber Heard, who as Mera, steals the show as an all-powerful beauty. I also loved how much of his horror background that Wan was able to bring to the film; a particular action sequence in the second act comes to mind, along with the use of a dolly zoom in an early action scene. There's a lot going on visually and tonally, but it's always fun one way or the other, and a blockbuster I can't wait to revisit.

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After seeing the drumming CGI octopus, hearing the Pitbull cover of Toto's 'Africa' and Black Manta looking like something straight out of Kamen Rider, if the movie hinted at a connection to Spongebob Squarepants, I would've bought it.

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[Dukefrukem]

James Wan is a good filmmaker. He has a great eye for action and tracking shots, a good vision for scale and not afraid to take on bizarre projects like Aquaman. If he only didn't take this movie so seriously as we step through the predictable beat by beat acts...

It's odd that all the DC movies we've seen over the past several years, Aquaman is the most ambitious with people riding sharks and weird dino-monster things, giant grab monsters exist and there's a giant Kraken with the voice of Ursula from the Little Mermaid.

The two most distracting things in the movie was CGI hair and digital aging of Jango Fett, Willem Dafoe and Nicole Kidman.

Black Manta was a 2nd villain we didn't need and I question his Tony Stark ability to dismantle and reassemble Atlantian technology.

I like that the movie movies from the ocean, to land; There's even a Sahara Desert and even a battle on Sicily. But we desperately needed more build up Battle of Helms deep to which there are races and characters fighting each other that we have not even been introduced to.

Overall, there should have been 15 minutes of action cut out of this- the final battle needed more build and the overall villain suffers from Marvel-villain-syndrome, (where the villain wants to take over the world because script). Patrick Wilson says he wants to get revenge for all the warships and trash in the ocean, but if they can summon tidal waves, why do they need the kings of the seven kingdoms to unite to kill all humans? Just send giant tidal waves to every continent. Despite all that I rather enjoyed this is a fun romp and when it got weird, that's what I enjoyed the most. There's even a few horror elements sprinkled in e.g. diving into the ocean with the flares at night surrounded by fish-monster people.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Despite all that I rather enjoyed this is a fun romp and when it got weird, that's what I enjoyed the most. There's even a few horror elements sprinkled in e.g. diving into the ocean with the flares at night surrounded by fish-monster people.

That horror "trench" stuff was a highlight, and when the visuals held the most steady. Loved the images, and loved the confrontation with the "Karathen." Agreed that the weirder the movie gets, the better.

[Dukefrukem]

That horror "trench" stuff was a highlight, and when the visuals held the most steady. Loved the images, and loved the confrontation with the "Karathen." Agreed that the weirder the movie gets, the better.

Overall it's hindered by Jason Momoa not being a very good lead (though don't get me wrong, they tried to make the chemistry work with humor here and there), and the primary villain taking himself way too seriously.

Loved the action scene in the sub.

[Wryan]

The most colorful Lovecraft movie fused with the wettest Indiana Jones or maybe Tintin. This shit was ludicrous, glorious, old-fashioned, cornball fun. They made a trident fight look badass. And Patrick Wilson sold the shit out of his antagonist. Manta was sort of unnecessary, unfortunately. This also had some absolutely striking visuals and photography. You could tell the intentional holding of certain hero shots that looked straight out of a comic book, but done so well. In the final fight, when Orm leaps onto the ship or whatever and holds in silhouette with the propellers twirling and his cape flapping in the wind--that shit was badass. They did a great job making this fun. When a movie has characters holding a quiet, intimate moment with each other, looking into each other's eyes or off in the distance, and then an explosion makes them fly off...and it happens like five times, you know it's not taking itself very seriously and neither should you. I loved this.

[Grouchy]

This was Wan's show-off reel and it benefited greatly for it. The term "CGI extravaganza" must have been coined to describe this film specifically, with its careless attitude towards plot and character and its series of action set pieces. It's a script that immediately crumbles under scrutiny but seems to willfully defy such a pointless exercise. I agree that there are plenty of Lovecraftian sights and that the character's mostly obscure lore was used to great effect - I totally lost it when the dinosaur island showed up. It's just a giant bubble of goofy fun that seems to foresee a not-so-awful future for the DC cinematic universe. I feel like I'm kicking a dead horse by saying this but I can't picture Snyder overseeing such a film.

And yeah, Momoa is not a good actor, but he fares well at the center of a giant spectacle populated with those.

EDIT: By the way, the movie didn't even bother to give a good explanation as to why the flares held underwater.

[Stay Puft]

Echoing earlier comments, and going one step further, I'd say this features some of the best superhero filmmaking period. Avengers: Infinity War, for example, doesn't have half as many good ideas, or any ideas that are half as good. James Wan styles on everybody who ever set foot behind a camera in the MCU. It's a ridiculous movie, wildly uneven and at times embarrassingly scripted, but the spectacle is supremely engineered and Wan's commitment to changing his style to suit individual scenes is refreshing in the most hilarious and depressing ways (the bar having been set so extremely low). But, yeah, from the opening submarine brawl that looks like it was ghost-directed by Timo Tjahjanto, to the Ong Bak instant replays of the underwater sword fight, a sequence that feels more like a random stage in Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry with its waves of increasingly difficult opponents, striking menacing poses as they enter the battleground, and midboss encounters, to Barry Lyndon zooms of Italian seaside dioramas that swap foreground and background planes of action, and aggressively swap POV shots to follow good guys and bad guys and remain thrilling and coherent, and how long can I keep this sentence going and what the hell am I even typing, to epic CGI underwater battles that play more like space battles in Return of the Jedi and feature sincere, melodramatic speeches delivered by crustacean people???... and my mind is breaking but I'm here for all of it... this is the most fun I've had watching a superhero movie since Thor: Ragnarok. Which means it's some of the most fun I've had watching one of these, period.

[Stay Puft]

I mean this STARTS with a Sigur Rós needledrop. In the first five minutes. And it just keeps going. God bless this mess.

[Lazlo]

I mean this STARTS with a Sigur Rós needledrop. In the first five minutes. And it just keeps going. God bless this mess.

Yes! My favorite song of theirs (I think), but in the movie it's cut off before the percussion kicks in and that seemed like a missed opportunity.

[Wryan]

What the fuck. Julie freaking Andrews voiced the giant leviathan creature!? Did not catch that in the theater lol.

[Dukefrukem]

What the fuck. Julie freaking Andrews voiced the giant leviathan creature!? Did not catch that in the theater lol.

I thought it was whomever voiced Ursula when I heard it.

[Dead & Messed Up]

What the fuck. Julie freaking Andrews voiced the giant leviathan creature!? Did not catch that in the theater lol.

Yep! And I love that that means Julie Andrews battled Mary Poppins for opening weekend supremacy and won.

[Grouchy]

Yep! And I love that that means Julie Andrews battled Mary Poppins for opening weekend supremacy and won.

Hah! That's awesome.

[StuSmallz]

Part of me wanted to admire how go-for-broke Aquaman went with its unique, outrageously heightened aesthetics, and how the first half hour was able to (more or less) walk the extremely fine line between being laughable-silly and cool-silly that kind of naturally comes with the turf with this character, but it firmly goes way over that line at a certain point and never looks back, overloading our senses with garish, cluttered, neon-CGI seascapes, an overlong, over-stuffed narrative that simultaneously wastes time lingering on moments we didn't need while also rushing through predictable story beats, genre cliches, and pathetically forced bits of comic "relief" that increasingly drew more and more crickets from my audience, and embarrassing normally dignified actors as they struggle (and fail mightly) not to look impossibly absurd, whether it be Arthur's "kingly" suit of golden pineapple-armor, Amber Heard's Ronald McDonald-style hair dye and mascara that's apparently water-proof up to 20,000 leagues under the sea, or Patrick Wilson's head moving independently of his CGI outfit to the point where it resembled the turtle shirt skit from SNL. I wanted to enjoy this, I really did, but dammit DC, you are now officially 0-6 with your success rate for me; step up your game!

[Irish]

I voted nay a little too quickly. Truth be told, I enjoyed this more than I'd care to admit.

This is only superhero flick in recent memory that has a Big Action Climax worth seeing; it's both unique and weird and kinda wonderous.

Everything before that is a bit of a bore, with shoddy video-game style plotting ("Goto location X and find item A, which will allow you to goto location Y and find item B, which will allow you to...")

I embraced the cheese and I wish the filmmakers had embraced it more. The movie has laser sharks and drummer octopi and costumes that look like they were stolen from the sets of "Power Rangers" and "Mega Man." I mean, the defiant crab-man at the end is my hero.

But for all of that, there's a curious lack of energy or entertainment in the first 90 minutes, which is packed with needless exposition and cliched fight choreography. (Along with lazy oversights, like how the hell Vulko knows Arthur.)

At its core, I think the writing went wrong the same way "Black Panther's" did: The most interesting character, who coincidentally drives most of the plot, isn't the protagonist. In "Panther," that was Killmonger. Here, it's the Queen Mom.

Still. A helluva ending -- and also, holy shit, a self-contained story!

[Grouchy]

I agree. The movie is excellent at showcasing its fantasy, outlandish world - but the narrative beats that get it to those places are way too lazy.