Review: "Aquaman"

James WAN (Dir.), “Aquaman”, Warner Bros./DC Comics, 2018.

This movie wouldn’t have even been on my radar as a possible subject for this blog but right at the start of the film – about ten minutes in – there was this:

Right. So they grabbed my attention. James Wan is an avowed Lovecraft fan, apparently.

Of course, the choice of title here is a bit weird (in other senses). If you sum up this film with the line “child of two worlds discovers his role and finds his destiny”, that certainly rings true, but it also applies to Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror – certainly not the most heroic - not to mention SUPER-heroic - of characters. I would have thought that The Shadow Over Innsmouth would have been a more appropriate title to choose. Of course, that book gets a guernsey later on…

Aquaman was always a bit of an enigma to me when I was growing up. The comics that I could get were usually locally-produced compendia gathering black-and-white reprints of the US four-colour versions, and these were mainly gatherings of Justice League stories with the odd solo story thrown in for good measure. These old 70s yarns usually relegated the Sea King to the background and focused very little on his capabilities, usually because the adventures took place far away from the ocean. Friends of mine would deride the character because “he talks to fish”, or “he rides a seahorse”, but I always thought that there was more to the guy than we were regularly seeing.

Think about it: the guy lives in a city at the bottom of the ocean. He regularly travels from Atlantis to the surface and he doesn’t go pop! each time he does so. That implies some extraordinary kind of musculature and pressure control; in fact, the sort of super-strength and invulnerability that would give Superman a run for his money. However, in the DC Universe, Supes is king, so he has to be the strongest. I would therefore put Aquaman at a close second, at least the equivalent of Wonder Woman and way more durable.

But, “I hear you can talk to fish”, is how we got introduced to the movie iteration of the character in “Justice League”. Along with the concept comes a poisoned chalice of dismissal that even Joss Whedon’s best comedy efforts couldn’t entirely ameliorate. As the director being handed control of this project, I assume that your mind would be boggling with the idea of taking the twinkly, sparkly ‘Cinderella-of-the-Sea-Floor’ trappings of the character and trying to jam Jason Momoa in there somewhere. I’m thinking My Little Bro’ny…

But, James Wan has H.P. Lovecraft to guide him. What we learn from HPL is that the sea is a very dark and scary place, at least as menacing and indifferent as the vast reaches of outer space and populated with a wide variety of creepy things with lots of teeth. Here is where Innsmouth comes into play. We are told that one faction of the Atlantean realm has split away and devolved into a community of subaqueous horrors known as the Trench. We encounter them shortly after Aquaman and Mera leave Sicily by boat and they look like this:

For my money these are damned near perfect Deep Ones, a little short in the goggle-eye department but very cool indeed.

In other aspects of the film, Wan doesn’t try to downplay or eliminate the tricky parts of the concept, rather he embraces them wholeheartedly. He establishes the sea-kingdoms as places of dark horror and potential danger, then uncorks a crap-load of wonder in the midst of it all. The ocean depths are also amazing in their diversity and beauty and Wan grabs all of it in both fists and paints his canvas as hard as he can with it. The vistas he unleashes are spectacular and breathtaking: grandeur is what he aims for and he damn well gets it right. Even his seahorses are gobsmacking:

But it’s a high-wire act and it almost collapses, not due to the visuals but in some of the story choices and in some of the performances.

There’s a lot of wood here. The problem with using a lot – a LOT – of CGI is that nuanced performances get lost amid the sparkle. It’s the digital equivalent of wearing a Gojira suit. When you’re strapped into a harness that’s crushing your gonads and wearing ping-pong balls on your head, your best Oscar-worthy expressions of The Art go right out the window. For guys like Dolph Lundgren and Temuera Morrison, that’s not really a problem; but when you hire Nicole Kidman and Willem Dafoe, it starts to look like wasted money. Not that there’re any really bad performances in this flick; it’s just that everything kind of gets evened out in the digital wash.

And then there’s Jason Momoa. In past efforts such as “Stargate: Atlantis” (ironic) and “The Bad Batch” he’s demonstrated a fair range beyond the trademark growl and smoulder, but here he has two modes – “ON”, and “ON-er”. “Restraint” doesn’t seem to be in his vocabulary. He’s obviously having a great time with this. I love the re-design of the character from its American white-bread appearance into a Pacific Islander vibe, with all the mokos and hongis and hakas and tokis, and Momoa is obviously relishing the cultural showcasing that’s taking place. It’s just that he tends to come off as a big kid, and that sort of relegates the movie to kid’s levels. “Guardians of the Galaxy” was a kid’s book that was able to grow up on film; it doesn’t quite happen here. Along with this, there’s not a lot of chemistry between Momoa and Amber Heard as Mera – it feels more like the sibling relationship Miles Morales has with Spider Gwen than a real romantic involvement. When you step back and look at it, all of the defining emotional moments of Arthur Curry’s life – loss; abandonment; alienation; personal discovery - are literally outsourced to other actors in this movie – Momoa doesn’t have to let pesky things like nuance interfere with his chewing-up of the scenery.

(He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?)

Of course, he’s being tarred by the same brush as all of the other actors – a subtle approach would most likely disappear beneath the computer wizardry, so it’s impossible to hold a grudge. Physically, he’s the perfect choice for this role and that’s always half the battle.

Palace intrigue forms the major part of this narrative and it sadly doesn’t get a lot of oxygen. I like me some good Machiavellian treachery but it’s the kind of thing that needs to brew over time, like in a TV series. Here, time constraints keep the scheming to a minimum and a lot of it is choppy and wasted. We get told that Volko is a “vizier” – despite the cultural incongruity of this term - and immediately we think of Jaffar from “Aladdin”, so – shortcut - we know he’s shifty. At one point, King Orm barrels into the throne-room of the Fisherfolk and slaughters their king, thereby bringing this faction under his immediate control. I mean, really? He and King Nereus should never have made it out of the throne room alive after such a despicable act, or else these mer-people really are the timid poets and intellectuals that Orm derides them as. I understand that such politicking needs to be shorthanded in this kind of vehicle, but it seemed a little weird – I could have done with less Indiana Jones-ing and more skullduggery.

As to that, there were some unnecessary moments of convenience about the archaeological sifting that stretched belief. We get a gizmo that needs to be taken to a lost place and activated, thereby revealing the next widget that leads us to the big MacGuffin – Atlan’s trident. Along the way, Aquaman displays brute ignorance and deft intelligence in equal measure as the plot requires and it’s all a bit naff. My estimations of Atlantean ruggedness were well-served in the scene where our heroes leap un-parachuted from an aeroplane but it was still a little silly (I did like the goat, though).

Then there’re the villains of the piece. The first is King Orm who shouts a lot. As Arthur Curry’s half-brother and in danger of having his dreams of conquest thwarted by a prior claim to the throne, his motivations are pretty clear from the start. He pouts, schemes and sulks as you’d expect, and is the kind of dick that such a role demands. I’m glad that they didn’t try to shoe-horn in a reconciliation between him and Aquaman before the credits – that would have been a bad misstep. Black Manta on the other hand was odd. I can only think that this guy is hopelessly, utterly mad. He starts off by way-laying a Russian submarine, shooting and stabbing all of its occupants in cold blood, and then gets fixatedly angry when Aquaman pays him back in the same coin. I mean, if you’re a pirate, with all of the ethical standards that go along with that role, you expect that, right? So your daddy gives you his favourite knife (oddly, in the middle of an on-going operation) and then gets pinned beneath a pile of fallen torpedoes – as a cold-blooded pirate, wouldn’t you just say “fair cop; thanks for the pig-sticker” and leave? Why so sentimental? It’s just one more way in which this film never quite leaves the kids’ movie tag behind. Props to Aquaman though, for leaving ‘Manta and his dad in the lurch – seemed like the right call to me!

In the final analysis, I was a bit conflicted about this film. It’s a bit rough around the edges, despite looking gorgeous, but it did allay all my reservations about how they’d treat the character (the fight between Mera and Aquaman and Black Manta in Sicily was particularly nice). As I said though there’s a fine line between wonder and camp and the last scene kind of tipped things the wrong way:

Was it just me who was reminded of Mel Brooks’s “Robin Hood: Men In Tights”?

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.