USA. 2023.
Crew
Director – James Wan, Screenplay – David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Story – David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Jason Momoa, Thomas Pa’a Sibbett & James Wan, Producers – Rob Cowan, Peter Safran & James Wan, Photography – Don Burgess, Music – Rupert Gregson-Williams, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nick Davis, Visual Effects – Cantina Creative, Cinesite (Supervisor – Rebecca Manning), DNeg (Supervisor – Stuart Lashley), Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Ivan Busquets), MPC (Supervisor – Hubert Maston), Rodeo FX & Scanline VFX (Supervisor – Julius Lechner), Special Effects Supervisor – Mark Holt, Prosthetic Designer – Krustyan Mallett, Makeup Effects – Fractured FX (Designer – Justin Raleigh), Production Design – Bill Brzeski. Production Company – Atomic Monster/Peter Safran.
Cast
Jason Momoa (Aquaman/Arthur Curry), Patrick Wilson (Orm), Yahya Abdul-Mateen III (Black Manta/David Kane), Nicole Kidman (Atlanna), Randall Park (Dr Stephen Shin), Amber Heard (Queen Mera), Temuera Morrison (Tom Curry), Dolph Lundgren (King Nereus), Martin Short (Voice of Kingfish), John Rhys-Davies (Voice of Brine King), Jani Zhao (Stingray), Vincent Regan (Atlan), Pilou Asbaek (Kordax)
Plot
Arthur Curry, alias Aquaman, now has a son Arthur Jr, but finds the business of being king of Atlantis tedious. Meanwhile, David Kane, alias Black Manta, is in Antarctica with archaeologist Stephen Shin searching for Atlantean artefacts with which he can take revenge against Aquaman. They fall into an ice crevasse, which leads to a cave where Kane discovers a trident. This belongs to Kordax, the brother of King Atlan, the founder of Atlantis, who turned to black sorcery and unleashed a terrible power. This meant that his kingdom Necrus had to be forever frozen in ice and blotted from history books. The frozen Kordax’s spirit calls to Kane, possessing him and promising great power if he will free him. Five months later, Kane masterminds a team using ancient submarine technology to break into Atlantean vaults to steal supplies of orichalcum. Arthur realises that Kane is using the orichalcum to create massive amounts of greenhouse gases and hurry along global warming. To find where Kane is hiding, Arthur is forced to take the step of freeing his traitorous brother Orm from captivity and trusting him to lead the way to Manta’s base.
The DCEU – the DC Cinematic Universe – was DC Comics’ belated attempt to compete with the massive success enjoyed by Marvel Comics and The MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). This started badly with Zack Snyder’s initial trilogy of films – Man of Steel (2013), Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017) – that were liked by nobody. The same could be said for Suicide Squad (2016), although Harley Quinn did become a breakout character. On the other hand, the wave of films that followed – Wonder Woman (2017), Aquaman (2018) and Shazam! (2019) – suddenly turned things around, while Zack Snyder proceeded to redeem himself with Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021).
For a brief time, the DCEU seemed to be in danger of offering a serious threat to the MCU. However, for whatever reasons, the DCEU had difficulty in following up on such a promise. The films that followed the successes they had – Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020), Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) and Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023) – all ended up being dogs. The sole exception to this was James Gunn’s entertaining The Suicide Squad (2021), which far outshone its predecessor.
By the early 2020s, other efforts that were coming out such as Black Adam (2022), Blue Beetle (2023) and The Flash (2023) were being dismissed and audiences failed to turn up in sufficient numbers to make them hits, even though I will defend Black Adam and The Flash as perfectly enjoyable entries. The problem with this was by the time of the last four films to be released the announcement of James Gunn’s new shared universe meant that the so-called Snyderverse they were already building on was dead – in other words, why engage with a mythos that was obsolete on delivery.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom befell this same fate and negative reviews as these others, although contrarily I quite enjoyed it. It has a number of problems, one of which is a wild change of tone over its predecessor, which I will discuss shortly, but mostly follows through on the world that James Wan and the legion of effects artists created in the first film.
The film does start in with a series of cringe-worthy scenes that give the impression that things have gone seriously wrong. We get an opening scene with Jason Momoa appearing and wiping out a gang of pirates. However, this is intercut with scenes with Momoa acting out the fight with toys to his infant son. When you compare this to the attack on the Russian submarine at the start of Aquaman, the results seem to deflating the seriousness of the action and Aquaman’s presence with goofy humour. Things are even more badly undone by the sight of Jason Momoa wandering through the house wearing fluffy slippers and gags about diverting streams of baby urine away from his face.
On the other hand, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom finds its feet not too long after that with a magnificent battle scene with Black Manta and his crew setting out in a wonderfully cool looking submarine and going into action in one-man submersibles designed like squids with twirling tentacles as propellers to raid the Atlantean vaults; the magnificence of Atlantis lit up in lights; and of seeing Nicole Kidman and Amber Heard going into action on mechanised sharks, sonic cannons pitted against hydro cannons, and Jason Momoa in hand-to-hand combat up against Black Manta amid much mass destruction. It hits the note of the epic action and effects spectacle that Aquaman did.
The film is filled with other such epic superheroic sequences. The invasion of the base at Devil’s Deep with Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson wandering through downing guards and then fighting the giant robotic squids in hand-to-hand combat, all before the island gets blown up; the climactic venture into the frozen city of Necrus and the unleashing of the trapped souls of the dead. Even filler scenes like the rescue from the jail come with epic sequences with Momoa and Wilson escaping on the back of giant centipedes; or the journey across the island filled with giant mutated bugs and plantlife.
Indeed, while the MCU has opted for effects spectacle that seems increasingly rote and by the numbers – and that’s not even getting into the subject of their wrangles with staff at effects houses being overworked and the choices of directors who have no experience with effects – the DCEU has been creating the very superheroic effects spectacle that the MCU seems to have lost touch with. Films like Aquaman, Black Adam and The Flash all do this with spectacular regard where you stretch to think of a single MCU film of the 2020s that had a single memorable effects sequence.
The major problem this time around has been the abrupt shift in the character of Aquaman. The first film incarnated the character with a magnificent macho presence, he was uber-human, looked great without a shirt and moved with a badass lethality. By the time of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, all of that is undercut by a constant of one-liners and a jibing relationship between Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson (well more Momoa with Wilson cast as the straight-man). There is a lot of one-liners that drag the film off in a wholly different direction, ongoing gags about cockroach eating – even action scenes that are interrupted so that the two can trade more one-liners.
The upshot is the reconception of Aquaman as a big doofus. He has no interest in the ruling of a kingdom and seems to have only one mode – going into action and beating things up where it frequently becomes apparent that he is doing so without a plan and making everything up as he is going along. There is a pandering on Wan’s part towards overly broad comedy – the scenes with Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson crossing the mutated island of Devil’s Deep are entirely distracted by comic banter; while the venture to the Secret Citadel comes out as a underwater version of the cantina scenes from Star Wars (1977) crossed with the Jabba the Hutt’s palace scenes from Return of the Jedi (1983). Here even the big serious moment of Aquaman stepping up before the UN to announce the existence of Atlantis and the decision to tackle the climate crisis is upstaged by Momoa doing mic drops and conducting a cheer at his own awesomeness. The film would easily have been improved with the dropping of these sequences.
It should be noted that this comedy focus is concomitant with Jason Momoa taking both a co-screen story credit and a co-producing role, so you get the impression that this is his wanting to take Aquaman back towards either his natural or preferred screen persona. And unfortunately, comedy is just not James Wan’s forte. On the plus side, it is nice seeing Momoa sporting the familiar gold and green costuming of the comic-book Aquaman, rather than the battle armour he has been given up until the end of Aquaman, which has been magnificent designed with iridescent gold scales and spiked bottle green gloves.
James Wan became a major directorial force in the horror genre after making his debut with Saw (2004). From there, Wan went on to make the ventriloquist’s dummy film Dead Silence (2007), the vigilante film Death Sentence (2007), the haunting/astral projection film Insidious (2010), the true-life haunting/possession film The Conjuring (2013), Insidious Chapter 2 (2013), The Conjuring 2 (2016) and Malignant (2021). Wan has also produced all of the Saw sequels, Annabelle (2014), Demonic (2015), Insidious Chapter 3 (2015), Lights Out (2016), Annabelle: Creation (2017), Insidious: The Last Key (2018), The Nun (2018), Annabelle Comes Home (2019), The Curse of La Llorona (2019), the tv series Swamp Thing (2019), The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), Mortal Kombat (2021), the tv series Archive 81 (2022), M3gan (2022), Insidious: The Red Door (2023), The Nun II (2023) and Night Swim (2024).
(Nominee for Best Special Effects and Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2023 Awards).
Trailer here