Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)
It's just that there's so much other stuff going in real life around the production and abrupt termination of the DCEU that it really is hard for this movie to appeal to anyone that's watching superhero movies as a serialized format. Again, as a generic punch-up huge CGI special effects movie, it's an all right one. As a sequel to Aquaman? As a part of a shared universe? As what's essentially the final movie for the DCEU?
I talked about it in my review for Flash and Blue Beetle, but it really is hard to be invested in a series of movies that concludes a theoretically long-running series of movies that... isn't even meant to conclude the Aquaman stories, let alone the entire DC universe. this is a movie that was released because people did work on it and it's done, moreso than any other reason. And... throw in the fact that we've got unexplained absences (Willem Dafoe's Vulko is just randomly killed off), the whole saga with Amber Heard as an actor, a whole lot of shoved-down-your-throat 'climate change' moral stuff (I agree that climate change is bad, but the movie had less subtlety than Golden Age comics), and a generally confusing plotline that doesn't have much to do with the more epic first Aquaman movie... yeah, this isn't the most coherent movie.
I will give praise where praise is due -- some of the CGI is pretty rough, but there were moments like the many-hand-armed desert creatures, the locusts on the random island, or the monstrous squid-creatures in the Lost Kingdom, or the way Black Manta's octopus robots moved, or Topo... those were pretty great. The budget of trying to make Atlantis as colourful as possible with wacky sea animal ships and whatnot makes this feel very cartoony in a good way. But the movie doesn't have consistent CGI throughout the movie. Our main villain, King Kordax, looks like a bad World of Warcraft CGI model (that's without the obvious Lich King ripoffs) and there were many moments where there's just something off with the lighting or how light reflects off of stuff underwater. And you don't really look too hard to compare this to the first Aquaman movie.
I would also like to praise the Aquaman/Ocean Master team-up. It's weird, I didn't expect it coming into the movie, but they put a fair amount of effort into it. Not all the dialogue and jokes land, and I honestly don't feel like the Ocean Master we saw in the first Aquaman movie would be capable of the character development here (he doesn't quite have the same excuse-plot motivations as Marvel's Loki did) but they did... okay with him. Orm essentially takes over as Aquaman's sidekick for the entirety of the movie, edging out the rest of his supporting cast, and it does admittedly feel a bit forced but they did okay with it. Awkward as it was, there at least was a character arc.
(And I realize that the real-world reason of Mera not being as involved in this movie is due to the allegations against the actress, but it is still a noticeable and jarring shift regardless)
The movie itself? The plot's rather confusing, and honestly kind of a waste. The first Aquaman movie gave us two villains that survived the movie and had sensible motivations to continue menace Arthur in the future. Ocean Master, disgraced brother who believes the kingdom is rightfully his; and Black Manta, a terrorist who blames the brutal Aquaman for his father's death. Okay, they want to make Ocean Master into an antihero. That kind of leaves Black Manta, who's pretty, fun, right?
Except... Black Manta spends 90% of his screentime possessed by a magical trident that came out of nowhere. He just comes across it, and when the ghost of a dead Atlantean king with less personality than a cardboard cutout starts talking to Manta, he just... he just spends the whole movie as the minion of a fucking ancient fork. This is worse than Hawkeye in the first Avengers movie, because that movie at least had Loki as an interesting antagonist. But Black Manta spends the entire movie just... just doing generically evil stuff, which has very little to do with his established motivations (which the movie event takes time to recap before ignoring them entirely) making the entirety of Black Manta's screentime in this movie no more interesting or impactful other than having a cool enemy for Arthur and Orm to fight against.
King Kordax himself? The titular Lost Kingdom of Necrus was just vaguely shown to us in flashbacks, before we get like a five-minute exposition around one hours and twenty minutes in while the movie runs around and lets Aquaman and Orm fight against random CGI monsters without any names, and... I'm just so confused and uninvested with all the talk about the 'seventh missing kingdom' and whatnot when the entire movie has been about Black Manta's something-something toxic-orichalcum secret-base climate-change plot. Kordax, when he actually gets resurrected, hilariously lasts a grand total of a whole minute before Aquaman one-shots him.
And... yeah. I really am struggling to find much to talk about the plot. We get introduced to some stuff like Aquaman struggling to balance his kingship and wanting to introduce Atlantis to the world; some stuff about climate change; the whole talk about Black Manta's vengeance... but so little of the movie is spent on the topics they build up and instead we keep going from one wacky location to the next, from the mysterious island of giant mutated animals to the underwater Mos Eisley Cantina to the desert prison. And don't get me wrong, again, as a punch-them-up Saturday morning movie I didn't mind having it play on my television when I'm folding laundry or whatever, but the movie itself really isn't the most coherent one... which was at least something that other sub-par superhero movies like Blue Beetle, Black Adam or Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania can claim.
Anyway, that's really all I have to say about this movie. I was entertained enough by it, but at the same time I felt like the movie is a huge pile of missed concepts that could've easily been far more well put together.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- In the comics, Kordax was one of Aquaman's ancestors and the originator of the "Curse of Kordax", which states that royal children born with blond hair and the ability to communicate with sea creatures would bring doom to Atlantis. Kordax himself waged war against the ancient kingdoms, and it was this curse that caused comics!Aquaman to face a fair amount of prejudice from the Atlanteans in addition to the whole half-human thing.
- In the comics, Aquaman's baby son was infamously killed by Black Manta, who suffocated him in a bubble of air. Of course, the same thing doesn't happen to Arthur Jr in the movie but it was clearly going for it.
- While the origin of it is completely different, the toxic oricalchum trident does originate from the comics, created by the supervillain Devil Ray to combat Atlanteans.
- Topo is noted to be able to 'play a variety of musical instruments', and he was infamous in the Silver Age comics for being able to be a one-man band. In fact, Topo's brief cameo in the first Aquaman movie does the same.
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