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veryrarelystableFinally managed to get to Aquaman on Friday night. I’d heard from some quarters that it was as good as, or even better than, Wonder Woman; from others that it was just as silly as everything else in the DCEU. Both claims are exaggerated, but the former in my opinion is closer to the mark.
I’ll start with the negatives so I can finish with the better things. Aquaman spends too much time trying to wow its audience visually, and it gets a bit old before the end. Some of those scenes could simply have been cut, some filled in with better character moments. It’s been compared, fairly I think, to James Cameron’s Avatar. A lot of background information about Atlantean politics is delivered in the form of “As you know, Bob” dialogue; not that “As you know, Bob” dialogue is always bad, but the way you make it not be bad is by using it for characterization as well as exposition, and the scenes I’m thinking of do only a little of that.
Aquaman has two main villains: Orm and Black Manta. They’re among the better DCEU villains we’ve seen so far, but that only puts them on a level with the less inspiring villains of the MCU or Star Wars franchises. Black Manta in particular would have worked much, much better if they had taken the trouble to make him sympathetic. He’s out to avenge his father’s death by Aquaman’s negligence, but the opening scene of the movie makes it pretty clear that his father deserved at least as bad as he got. If he had had some kind of higher agenda he might have aspired to being the DCEU’s Killmonger; as it is, he’s roughly equal to Ronan or Malekith.
Orm, Aquaman’s Atlantean half-brother, is a bit better. He’s saved from being a cookie-cutter moustache-twirling throne-seizing fantasy cliché by the fact that the Atlanteans really do have a legitimate grievance against the surface-dwellers, which Orm is quite reasonable in believing he alone has the will to pursue. I do hope that Aquaman in future outings will prove him wrong by combatting ocean polluters and weapon-testers; yes it would be political, but Warner Bros. needs to realize (as Marvel and Star Wars have) that sometimes politicizing stories strengthens rather than weakens them. Orm’s arc is somewhat undermined by the fact that his treachery – conspiring with Black Manta to fake a human attack on Atlantis so as to gain the other Atlantean leaders’ allegiance – is never exposed.
Arthur Curry / Aquaman is much better. The personality traits that Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon kind of draped over him like seaweed in Justice League, James Wan and Jason Momoa have taken and woven together into a believable, sympathetic, engagingly flawed character: his pride in his physical strength counterbalanced by his distaste for responsibility; his pessimism as to the big-picture usefulness of superheroics expressed through his cheery “screw it, I’m just here to have fun” attitude; his need to help innocent people and his discomfort in the spotlight; even his awkwardness around women who are both strong and attractive, which in the earlier film was just played for that Whedon joke about him sitting on Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth. Also, he’s now canonically Māori and no-one can take that away.
Arthur’s backstory flashbacks are a bit generic, including the obligatory childhood bullying scene written by someone who hasn’t experienced childhood bullying from the pointy end. But the real treasure of the film, the reason I’m judging it a close rather than a distant second to Wonder Woman in the DCEU franchise, is the romance between Arthur’s parents, Thomas Curry and Queen Atlanna. When Aquaman gives you visual effects at the expense of character, it gets dull; when it does the opposite it truly shines. I’m referring to how Temuera Morrison and Nicole Kidman are digitally de-aged for a lengthy sequence early on. Visually it’s as awkward as Henry Cavill’s invisible moustache in Justice League, but those scenes have so much vibrancy of character that it doesn’t matter. Honestly, their love and loss of each other had me tearing up repeatedly. And James Wan had the good sense to make the resolution of that story the closing scene of the movie.
Can Aquaman and Wonder Woman save the DCEU? That remains to be seen. The lesson Warner Bros. needs to take is: respect your characters. Unfortunately Zack Snyder screwed that up right from the get-go by giving us a killer Superman and a gun-wielding Batman, and it’s really not clear where they can go from there without retconning the franchise so that didn’t happen. The bright side is that that still might be better than running with what we actually got.
I’ll start with the negatives so I can finish with the better things. Aquaman spends too much time trying to wow its audience visually, and it gets a bit old before the end. Some of those scenes could simply have been cut, some filled in with better character moments. It’s been compared, fairly I think, to James Cameron’s Avatar. A lot of background information about Atlantean politics is delivered in the form of “As you know, Bob” dialogue; not that “As you know, Bob” dialogue is always bad, but the way you make it not be bad is by using it for characterization as well as exposition, and the scenes I’m thinking of do only a little of that.
Aquaman has two main villains: Orm and Black Manta. They’re among the better DCEU villains we’ve seen so far, but that only puts them on a level with the less inspiring villains of the MCU or Star Wars franchises. Black Manta in particular would have worked much, much better if they had taken the trouble to make him sympathetic. He’s out to avenge his father’s death by Aquaman’s negligence, but the opening scene of the movie makes it pretty clear that his father deserved at least as bad as he got. If he had had some kind of higher agenda he might have aspired to being the DCEU’s Killmonger; as it is, he’s roughly equal to Ronan or Malekith.
Orm, Aquaman’s Atlantean half-brother, is a bit better. He’s saved from being a cookie-cutter moustache-twirling throne-seizing fantasy cliché by the fact that the Atlanteans really do have a legitimate grievance against the surface-dwellers, which Orm is quite reasonable in believing he alone has the will to pursue. I do hope that Aquaman in future outings will prove him wrong by combatting ocean polluters and weapon-testers; yes it would be political, but Warner Bros. needs to realize (as Marvel and Star Wars have) that sometimes politicizing stories strengthens rather than weakens them. Orm’s arc is somewhat undermined by the fact that his treachery – conspiring with Black Manta to fake a human attack on Atlantis so as to gain the other Atlantean leaders’ allegiance – is never exposed.
Arthur Curry / Aquaman is much better. The personality traits that Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon kind of draped over him like seaweed in Justice League, James Wan and Jason Momoa have taken and woven together into a believable, sympathetic, engagingly flawed character: his pride in his physical strength counterbalanced by his distaste for responsibility; his pessimism as to the big-picture usefulness of superheroics expressed through his cheery “screw it, I’m just here to have fun” attitude; his need to help innocent people and his discomfort in the spotlight; even his awkwardness around women who are both strong and attractive, which in the earlier film was just played for that Whedon joke about him sitting on Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth. Also, he’s now canonically Māori and no-one can take that away.
Arthur’s backstory flashbacks are a bit generic, including the obligatory childhood bullying scene written by someone who hasn’t experienced childhood bullying from the pointy end. But the real treasure of the film, the reason I’m judging it a close rather than a distant second to Wonder Woman in the DCEU franchise, is the romance between Arthur’s parents, Thomas Curry and Queen Atlanna. When Aquaman gives you visual effects at the expense of character, it gets dull; when it does the opposite it truly shines. I’m referring to how Temuera Morrison and Nicole Kidman are digitally de-aged for a lengthy sequence early on. Visually it’s as awkward as Henry Cavill’s invisible moustache in Justice League, but those scenes have so much vibrancy of character that it doesn’t matter. Honestly, their love and loss of each other had me tearing up repeatedly. And James Wan had the good sense to make the resolution of that story the closing scene of the movie.
Can Aquaman and Wonder Woman save the DCEU? That remains to be seen. The lesson Warner Bros. needs to take is: respect your characters. Unfortunately Zack Snyder screwed that up right from the get-go by giving us a killer Superman and a gun-wielding Batman, and it’s really not clear where they can go from there without retconning the franchise so that didn’t happen. The bright side is that that still might be better than running with what we actually got.
