We are here at the end of it all folks. The DCEU: 2013-2023. And similarly as it started, with its second entry, Batman V. Superman, the fabled cinematic universe ends with a whimper instead of a bang. It brings me no joy to say that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is as much of a mess as the rumors have decried.
And it is a major shame considering that the first film was one of the more enjoyable entries in the franchise, and the only entry to break $1B at the box office. And look, sometimes a mess can be enjoyable fun. Just look at the ridiculous The Meg 2; a film truly self-aware of how stupid and awful it was. But sometimes a mess is just, well, a mess. And this is the case with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
One will find that in nerd-world, rumors are more often misleading than not. Everyone thought Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was going to be a game changer with every single Marvel cameo ever. Everyone thought The Flash was going to be the greatest movie ever. And history will attest to the fact that neither of those things turned out to be true.
As such, I refused to let the rumors of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom‘s poor test screenings convince me this was going to be a disaster. How could it be? James Wan is a terrific director. Jason Momoa oozes charisma, and came off an amazing performance earlier this year in Fast X. If nothing else, it could have just been a good time. But sadly, the movie is just way too poorly written and poorly slapped together haphazardly to be enjoyable in any way. So sadly, in this case, the rumors were true.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom picks up a few years after the first film. Arthur Curry and Mera are now married, living on the surface with a son, Arthur Jr. But they’re also spending half of their time ruling Atlantis and trying to keep the peace between the ocean and the surface world. Unfortunately, Black Manta, teaming up with Dr. Shin from the first film, has discovered the fabled Lost Kingdom — Necrus. And with it, the fabled Black Trident of Kordax, which has made him far more of a powerful challenge for Arthur and the entire kingdom of Atlantis. So Aquaman has to team up with his imprisoned brother Orm to stop Manta from destroying the world and everything Arthur holds dear.
Before I get to its issues, there are a few bright spots in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. For one thing, Patrick Wilson is a very charming actor. Despite the fact that the rest of the cast seems to be phoning it in, he’s actually doing his best to make you care for a character that we never previously cared for. He’s actually putting in some sort of effort in his performance, playing it completely straight to Momoa’s at-times excessive Arthur. And Orm’s character actually does feel somewhat justified in certain cases because, as Wan stated in our interview with him, he truly comes off as a character that’s simply trying to do right by his people. More so than Arthur at times. He’s calm, and rational. So it feels like we are watching the only sane character in a movie that’s gone completely gone off the rails.
There are also several and surprisingly brilliantly choreographed fight scenes in the movie. Definitely not any of the CG-overkill action set pieces. But the hand-to-hand trident battles between Black Manta and Aquaman and Orm are well shot, impressively fluid, and well performed by the hardworking stuntmen behind the film. There’s one midway through the film that really impressed me, and another at the end.
Having said that, a few terrific hand-to-hand combat scenes, and Patrick Wilson trying to keep things afloat aren’t enough to save this horrendously written patch job of a film. And with that, it’s time to get into the severe issues of this movie. Where do we begin?
How about we start where the movie starts. With not one, but two “pee pee” joke scenes, within a span of five minutes. All set to a poorly strung together montage explaining what has happened with Arthur and Mera between the two films. As I was watching the introduction to the movie unfolding, I couldn’t help but think, not only about how unbelievably corny it all was, but also how apathetically chaotic everything was put together. It reeked of last minute executive notes informing the filmmakers they had to clumsily rush through exposition about what happened with Arthur and Mera because they figured audiences wouldn’t understand where the characters were at this point in the story. And they had to have Momoa put in a hammy voice over narration to explain to us what was clearly being shown on screen. Add to this a really terrible, ridiculous-looking scene of a baby using aqua-powers on a fish tank, and you’ve got a terribly constructed comedy of flat jokes that was more in line with a low-budget Nickelodeon sitcom than a $200+ million franchise film. And I thought there was no way this movie could possibly get any worse than lowest common denominator humor to bring in the 6-year olds, but the surprises only continued from there.
Throughout the movie you had characters spouting the most cringeworthy dialogue at one another. How is it possible that you can have Yahya Abdul-Mateen win an Emmy and star in a Best Picture Oscar contender between the first movie and this one, and have him spit out horrible lines to the effect of (and I’m paraphrasing) “I’m gonna kill me a dead mermaid” or “First you steal your brother’s throne, and then you steal his woman? Aquaman! Shame on you!” It utterly wastes the likes of Nicole Kidman, who is literally just there to spit out exposition, despite having a really strong arc in the first movie, as well as Dolph Lundgren and Randall Park. Thank God Willem Dafoe said no to this one!
There are simply baffling decisions made throughout the movie that made me sink to my seat in embarrassment for everyone involved. And worst of all, you’ll realize how redundant those bad decisions are when they’re repeated throughout the movie, as if the filmmakers thought they were good ideas. I kid you not, there are two scenes where someone eats a cockroach, which, in conjunction with the “pee pee” scenes, essentially summarizes the film’s attempts at humor, with all of it ultimately landing with a giant belly flop. And at least two points in this movie, Momoa shouts out “Stay away from my [insert name of family member here]” angrily at Black Manta. There’s part of me that’s incredibly curious if the screenwriters hired a kindergartener to write this movie, because the juvenile attempts at humor and dialogue makes it seem that way.
Further horrible decisions include jumping ahead in the narrative five months after the movie’s intro, and filling in the audience with last minute dubbed voice over exposition to explain how much has happened with Manta in that timeframe, courtesy of Park dictating notes to himself on a recorder – as if he was trying to catch himself up? This ends up yielding ridiculous lines such as (again paraphrasing) “somehow… he knows all of these secrets… it must be magic.” I sat there awestruck by how amateurish everything felt from a writing and filmmaking perspective, and how a $200M feature with a terrific director and cast could have sunk so low.
The other thing that bothered me was unfortunately we got to see the downside to Momoa’s charisma. One of the actor’s finest strengths has always been his infectious “frat boy” energy. We saw it utilized to its greatest potential in the aforementioned Fast X, but Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom utilizes one of its biggest strengths in the most grating way. Aquaman comes across as a completely irredeemable idiot in this one. It got to the point where a friend of mine, who hadn’t seen the first movie, whispered to me during the movie, “he’s so unlikable!” There was a charm to Arthur’s bullheaded immaturity in that first movie. But it’s gone here, as he comes across as a completely unfit ruler who you simply can’t stand to be around, yammering on about burgers and beers. Every decision he makes seems to be the most reckless one, which would be consistent with what they’ve established thus far, only it’s dialed up to 11. And thus, unrealistically, everything he does seems like the one thing no one would ever do in the same situation.
For instance, when given a stealth suit (which by the way seems to somehow make his body and head invisible despite not even covering an inch of Momoa from the neck up) to complete a mission that he can’t be implicated for at the risk of starting a war, the character seems not to give a crap, and decides to go full bruiser on several characters who see his face without the invisibility turned on. His recklessness is only saved by the cheesiest looking ninja kick from Orm (that’s not an expression, Orm literally ninja kicks someone like Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat at some point in the film). That’s how little this movie seems to care about logic or likability of any sort.
Furthermore, so much of Aquaman and the Lost City rips off whole chunks of plot elements from much better movies like Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther. The Orm and Arthur relationship is so derivative of Ragnarok, that at one point, Arthur has to refer to Orm as “Loki” just so the filmmakers can seem like they’re being self aware of how much they’re riffing off the Thor and Loki relationship. Then there’s an entire subplot within the movie about Arthur imploring for the Atlantean council to reveal Atlantis’s existence to the surface world, which results in a UN Press Conference where Arthur promises to share Atlantis’s scientific technology and knowledge with the rest of the world to help unify everyone. This speech was almost beat for beat ripped off from T’Challa’s speech at the end of the first Black Panther movie. It’s almost like they didn’t even try to write something unique or go in a different direction. The only major difference was there’s a giant CG lobster/crab creature on stage at the UN event beside Momoa in his Aquaman costume instead of Lupita Nyong’o. By this point, I was watching the movie through my hands in a permanent face-palm position.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom also can’t help but continue to commit the sins every comic book movie makes, only tenfold. The entire movie looks and feels like CG diarrhea. The first movie’s scenes within Atlantis were cartoonish, but colorful and charming. But here, it’s ugly sensory overload. You can’t go one scene without a giant monster doodad attacking our heroes for random reasons, only to segue into moments where shrill, shouting nameless villains would get into their sci-fi submarines and mechanical pods to do battle with our heroes. It all evoked shades of the ugly visual effects and production designs from movies like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The stakes felt completely weightless as a result, so the action scenes (apart from the hand-to-hand trident battles) felt so limp and ugly, never once feeling enjoyable or even breezy. And once again, we’re presented with an overused “world ending apocalypse” storyline, which has reduced its somewhat previously sympathetic villain into a snarling mad man screaming only about vengeance. And all of this to shoe-horn in a heavy handed environmental message into the movie as well. Additionally, any time any character seemed to face certain death, almost immediately, the movie would assure us they’d be fine the following scene. So what really is there for me to care about?
Now look. I realize that I’m going to come across as hypocritical here after giving movies with similar problems a pass. I am one of the few that will defend Taika Waititi’s work in Thor: Love and Thunder. I’ve even given positive reviews to Quantumania and The Marvels. But each of these movies had really redeeming qualities for me that made me see past the criticisms of most. Love and Thunder had heart that was missing from The Lost Kingdom. Quantumania had a villain that actually felt menacing, and the charm of Paul Rudd, which has never lustered. And I had a lot of fun with the charming and dynamic chemistry between Carol, Kamala, and Monica, and the unique action scenes in The Marvels. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom has none of those things to compensate for its flaws. It’s mostly devoid of anything really remotely enjoyable or fun. And worst of all, it turned the greatest assets from the first movie into some of its biggest weaknesses — namely the performances of Momoa, who comes across obnoxious, and Abdul-Mateen, who they reduced to a one-note stock character with cheesy lines.
It’s been a rough year for superhero movies. That to me is heartbreaking to admit, as a lifelong comic book/superhero fan. And to be honest, I was convinced I saw the worst of it after laying eyes on Ezra Miller swallowing a tooth in slow motion before feeding himself rotten broccoli in The Flash. But sadly, I think Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom might be a lot worse. The Flash is at least redeemed by Michael Keaton’s charming return to the cape and cowl, and Sasha Calle’s strong performance. Plus some pretty heartfelt (if not emotionally manipulative) scenes. However everything about Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom feels lazy, cheap, and hollow, from the effects, to the jokes, to the performances, and lastly the horrendous script. There isn’t a shred of warmth or wit to this movie, or anything really of true merit that would possibly get me to feel any semblance of joy from it; camp or legitimate. The one bright side to it all is that this one is the final nail in the coffin that is the mixed-at-best bag known as the DC Extended Universe. And the best thing of all about such a thing is knowing that, as Harvey Dent said in a non-DCEU film, the night is darkest before the dawn. And with this conclusion of the franchise, atrocious and rough as it might be to sit through, the opportunity for a brighter revival is just a few years away. In short, at minimum, the dawn is coming.
Overall Score: D –
