Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

After failing to defeat Aquaman the first time, Black Manta stumbles onto the infamous Black Trident, and decides to use its destructive power to free an ancient malevolent force that will destroy his enemy forever. In order to stop him, Aquaman, now the current king of Atlantis, must forge an unlikely alliance with his half-brother, Orm, the Ocean Master, and the former king of Atlantis. The acrimonious pair must set aside their differences in order to protect the underwater kingdom from the forces of evil—both old and new—that threaten it, while also saving the entire world from a global climate catastrophe.

Created by Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger in November of 1941, Aquaman first appeared as a backup feature in More Fun Comics, issue #73, and went on to star in several different solo comic book series. When the Silver Age of comics started in the 50s and 60s, he became a founding member of the Justice League of America, when he, the Flash, Green Lantern, the Martian Manhunter, and Wonder Woman teamed-up for the very first time to face the cosmic menace that is Starro, the Conqueror.

Yep, Starro was the Justice League’s first villain, the giant Starfish kaiju from the second Suicide Squad movie (the good one).

So, the origins of the character basically goes like this… when the Queen of Atlantis decides to go slummin’ it on the surface world, she meets a human lighthouse-keeper who has no issue with freely fornicating with fish-people, and nine months later… she has a little baby boy-fish.

His human name is Arthur Curry. His Atlantean name is Orin. To the rest of the world, he is known as…

Like all very long-lived superheroes, Aquaman has had a litany of weird-ass powers granted to him by some creators, which were eventually taken away by later creators, mostly because they were kind of dumb, or way too powerful. For the most part, he is known for talking to fish telepathically, with some aquatic life being more amendable to chatting than others, like piranhas, for instance, who once ate his hand in a total fuck you to the King of the Sea.

Most of his other superhuman powers derive from the fact that he lives underwater, like… he can breathe underwater and he’s superhumanly strong, even for an Atlantean, in order withstand the deep depths of the ocean. He can swim really fast, thousands of miles per hour, and he once swam up Niagara Falls. I don’t know if that classifies as a power per se, but it is a super weird, albeit admittedly impressive, thing to do. He has a sonar-like sense too, and he can also see in near total darkness.

He’s been know to carry the Trident of Neptune, a weapon gifted to him by Poseidon, as the rightful ruler and protector of the seas. It’s indestructible, and it can do a whole bunch of dumb shit (depending on the creator), like control water. Mostly though, it’s just pointy and made of metal, so he either stabs or hits people with it.

Also, after the previously mentioned jerk piranhas ate his left hand, he replaced it with a “cybernetic retractable hook” because it was the 1990s, which was eventually changed into a “liquid metal hand” because it was the 2000s, which was later replaced by a “magical hand made out of water” because apparently someone said “Welp, this is as stupid as it gets” and somebody else said “Hold my Zima.” Eventually, sanity was restored, and he got his real hand back, probably because he has starfish powers and re-grew it, I assume.

There have been a handful of others who have used the title of Aquaman over the years, including a short-lived human successor named Joseph Curry, which I assume was due to someone misremembering the actual character’s human name. Then there was Jackson Hyde, his Atlantean name being Kaldur'ahm, or Kaldur for short, who is the revamped Aqualad from the popular Young Justice Cartoon. And during WW2, there was apparently a guy named Adam Waterman.

Adam Waterman.

I mean, they weren’t even trying…

Anyway, Aquaman's stories always tended to blend high fantasy and science fiction like an underwater Flash Gordon, but in the 1990s, there was a switch in how he was presented. In an effort to get readers to take the character more seriously, DC comics leaned hard into his role as king of Atlantis. He became more dour and brooding, a fish-man weighed down by his responsibilities as the fish-king, struggling with the complex world of Atlantean politics on a global scale, while also turning him into more of an underwater Klingon/Viking kind of hard-ass, a hard-drinking, rough and tumble sailor type, which is how we got to Jason Momoa being cast as the character, he’s charming and charismatic, sure, but it was mostly due to his role as Khal Drogo on Game of Thrones. Because otherwise, traditionally, Aquaman has been a character that was a little hard to take seriously…

The character's original 1960s “also appearing” role in the Superfriends cartoon not only made him one of the most recognizable superheroes in the world, but it also left a lasting impression of the character as being a big goof, which is the entire reason that butthurt nerds have since tried to turn Aquaman into the super bad-ass, edgy, long-haired and grumbly, underwater Klingon/Viking version I mentioned.

But there’s just no shaking his goofball status.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom starts out addressing all the Aquaman jokes. This is a nice attempt at self-awareness at first, but it turns out to be more of a herald of the uneven tone of the rest of the film. The first Aquaman was a pleasant surprise. I didn’t watch it for a while, because I’m both not interested in Aquaman in general, but I am also very not interested in the crappy Snyderverse versions of DC heroes specifically. But it went on to make a surprising amount of money and people seemed to really like it, and I’m into this kind of shit in general, so I finally checked it out and it was… not bad. Not as bad as I assumed it would be, at least. A pleasant surprise. Although, when I returned and watched it again some time later… it did not hold up.

The second film is much, much worse.

I should’ve known, since I basically heard nothing about this film after its release, so little in fact, that I forgot it was even out until it popped up on the streaming services, and holy shit, now I know why.

Good lord, I can’t believe this thing was only 2 hours long too.

Basically, Aquaman is bored as king, and longs for action. Also, he has a new baby. Lucky for him, Black Manta attacks Atlantis, after accidentally finding some ancient Atlantean technology from a long-dead tribe of evil fish-people, whose tech not only threatened to enslave the ancient world, but to cause an ecological disaster due to its poisonous emissions. Unluckily for him, Black Manta puts Aquaman’s wife, Mera, in the fish-hospital during the attack, so when Aquaman finds her almost floating belly-up, he is very, very mad. “Oh, I’m gonna get’cha, Black Manta,” says Aquaman in a Macho Man Randy Savage voice. (I wish)

So, for narrative reasons that aren’t clear—save that WB/DC obviously wanted to make Aquaman and Ocean Master into their version of Thor and Loki, at one point, even having Aquaman directly and derisively refer to Ocean Master as Loki, which implies that the Marvel Movies exist in the DC Universe? But I digress… point is, the effort failed—so, as I was saying, Aquaman must spring his brother Orm, the Ocean Master, from the most half-ass, easily broken into and out of, fantasy prisons ever to be made by some writer who clearly did not give a shit about this project. The duo then escape to Skull Island, where they get chased by some giant bugs. Then they fight some mechanical octupi.

I know that sounds like it could be cool, but that’s the problem… it’s not.

And then, I don’t know, a bunch of other shit happens. Explosions. Yelling. Swimming. Running around. The plot of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is basically a bunch of pulpy Arthurian nonsense, mixed in with a ton of Star Trek technobabble, in the middle of the Star Wars cantina, but, y’know… all underwater. There’s a quirky octupus too, and his name is Glip-glorp or Zeebo or some shit…

I dunno. Shit just happens.

It feels like, with very few adjustments, this film could easily be adapted into a Fast and the Furious movie. The story basically relies heavily on the Benny Hill school of filmmaking, lots of wild running around and falling over. It’s a way-too-sweet mix of really bad jokes, clunky CGI-heavy action set pieces, and a near constant cacophony of references to better movies, and their designs, but it’s all the kind of homages that are just shy of being blatant rip-offs. Like, for instance, the long-dead evil fish-man king and his army? Interchangeable with the ghostly oathbreakers from Return of the King. The whole film is like this. I imagine the film’s scenes all assembled on a white board in the writer’s room, each one labeled with the title of the movie it’s ripping off. “Winter Soldier” scene, “Mummy Returns” scene, “Skull Island” scene, “Return of the King” scene, “Iron Man” reference…

I have no proof, obviously, but the script feels like such a last minute afterthought, like it’s the result of the creators having all this money, because of the success of the last film, and a good chunk of time to write the script for the sequel, but instead they decided to just fuck off to Bora Bora for a month “for research” and one morning, they sat up from a big pile of bikini tops, and were like “Oh shit, the script is due Monday!” so they banged out this miss-mash quilt of rip-offs and cliches over a weekend.

As a cinematic experience, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom starts off slowly as just okay, but then very quickly veers off into nigh unwatchable. Ultimately, it’s definitely not as good as The Blue Beetle, and it’s maybe not as bad as The Flash, maybe, but I’d sit through Black Adam again before I’d decide to sit through this tedious piece of shit one more time.

I will give Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom at least some props for unapolegetically being a film about the climate crisis, about plagues, and the toxic harm of regressive traditions, not to mention the dark chickens, born from the sins of our pasts, finally coming home to roost. Even mentioning these types of things in pop culture tend to make the worst people in our rotten society super mad, and ruins their day, so yeah, I’ll give it to the film at least a little bit for spitting in a bunch of assholes’ eyes.

But only a little bit...

And while I really do love the classic maniacal, monologuing supervillain with a specific motif and an army of henchmen all dressed in thematically congruent outfits, especially if that includes vehicles designed with similarly appropriate and completely superfluous flourishes, that can’t save this movie from being the worst kind of welded-together Frankenstein of multiple scripts/multiple reshoots, probably due to the input of too many stupid executives, and way too many extra-stupid Burbank test audiences.

Also, the film itself is often just too murky. Yes, it’s because they’re supposed to be underwater, I get that, but still, everything is too dull, too washed-out, too hard to see. I would have liked to have been able to enjoy the details of this ancient underwater world at least.

In the end, the whole thing is just too long, too clunky, way too overly-expository, nothing but cobbled together drivel that barely has an overarching story, let alone any character arcs or themes, it’s just… bad. Despite a few good moments, and the fact that Jason Mamoa is definitely a charming guy, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is just not a good film.

Not at all.