Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
A modern man with a demanding job and a young son, the work/life balance of Arthur “Aquaman” Curry is not what he might like it to be, King of Atlantis, sometimes member of the loose association known as the Justice League, keeper of the lighthouse, defender of the oceans and the man who speaks to fish and aquatic mammals, a power which Arthur Junior has inherited and is already demonstrating to the delight of his proud father.
With one foot on the land and another in the sea, the world is changing, the safety of the secret empire of Atlantis and the lands above threatened by global warming, the oceans warming and becoming more acidic and the ice caps melting faster than predicted, deliberately accelerated by David “Black Manta” Kane who in his hunt for Atlantis has instead found the Black Trident of Kordax.
The ruler of the lost kingdom of Necrus, trapped forever within ice and seeking escape, his resurrection would be disastrous for the worlds above and below but the only lead Aquaman has to help him find Kane is his own estranged brother Orm, imprisoned in a desert stronghold by the Fisherman kingdom after assassinating their king, any attempt to free him likely to fracture the already shaky union of the undersea kingdoms.
The DC Extended Universe never having established itself as coherently as the Marvel equivalent, plagued by an uncertain and wavering tone which failed to connect with audiences and dramatic shifts in direction including substantial reshoots, reboots and projects abandoned altogether, that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the end of the line before a total reinvention was not the plan for a film which barely manages to remain coherent within itself without any consideration of the wider context.
Jason Momoa’s Aquaman having been introduced in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016 before leading his own film in 2018, five years is a long time for his solo sequel to arrive and yet still somehow Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom seems as though it would have benefitted from a thorough overhaul by director James Wan – or perhaps someone else – before release, the opening half of the film as disjointed as the surge and lull of the waves and as chaotic as an ocean storm, plot points shouted through the torrents of water.
Despite this being the role he was born to play, Momoa’s undeniable charms are wasted as he wades through zombie armies seemingly leftover from his time as Conan, and other than Patrick Wilson’s Orm the supporting cast including Amber Heard, Dolph Lundgren and Temuera Morrison are lost in the grating spectacle of every location which shrieks for attention at the cost of character or plot, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Black Manta particularly short-changed in his two movie quest for revenge which has caused more collateral damage than any wrong which was ever done to him.
Everything digital and none of it convincing, Atlantis resembling nothing so much as the Gungan realm of The Phantom Menace, despite the high technology of the underwater kingdoms the film dips more than its toes into fantasy than the wonder of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, particularly with the off-the-shelf mythology of Necrus (Mordor), the Black Trident (the One Ring) corrupting those who bear it to the will of Pilou Asbæk’s Kordax (Sauron).
When Christopher Reeve took to the sky as Superman, the tagline was “you’ll believe a man can fly,” and in a superhero film that belief is crucial, for if nothing is real then there are no stakes, and with clumsy technobabble instead of sharp dialogue and both heroes and villains possessed of super speed, super strength and seemingly invulnerable to all injury there is little reason to engage; that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom improves in its second half as it arrives at The Land That Time Forgot is faint praise, and as his swan song it represents neither the best of the DCEU nor is it even the best film to feature Momoa in a role which, in other circumstances, he might have continue to play joyously for years to come.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is on general release and also screening in IMAX
