Review of Aquaman (2018) by Patrick M — 24 Dec 2018

I just didn't like this very much at all. While I appreciate the attempt at world building, every character's motivations are just so cliched, every ludicrous new development and unexpected explosion would suck the air (or water) right out of the necessary suspension of disbelief.

A random little girl character just happens to hand princess mera a pinnocchio book for legit no reason without saying a word to her even though we just heard her talk and react in way too relaxed a fashion when confronted with amazing water magic.

I counted at least 4 sudden explosions followed by a wave of baddies confronting and chasing our heroes around. The national treasure-esque chase for the trident macguffin also just increased in absurdity.

One moment where the female lead uses her magic water powers to gather a drop of that sweet h2O from aquaman's brow had my brother and I rolling our eyes over. It was far from the only time that happened actually as a couple of other moments throughout the film, especially the grandiose character introductions, cheesy lines, wanton disregard for the laws of physics (an early scene with a submarine being lifted to the surface somehow inexplicably left the submarine at the surface despite the ballast tanks necessarily having to have been empty since it was cruising along just moments ago, a somewhat exciting rooftop parkour chase scene in Italy likewise became humorous for how some roofs easily crumbled under character's weights while others arbitrarily could support fully armored men running at top speed, some guy also gets trapped under a column in this scene and it just doesn't make sense how he gets up and walks away right after it, or any of the stuff about nicole kidman winding up trapped for so many years) and general narrative failures, also kept me from engaging with the content.

I will finish this rather unflattering appraisal by mentioning how I felt the uninteresting villains left a lot to be desired with their generic motivations i.e. "you killed my (pirate) father" and "I am the one true king/your evil brother, you half-blood mongrel" speeches becoming tiresome precisely a second after coming out of their mouths.

The black mantis character felt just too intentionally shoehorned and patrick wilson as king arthur's evil half-brother was just boring in the worst way and not menacing at all, imho. Not great not terrible I suppose, the one standout scene I remember enjoying was a shortish long take following many random foot(fin?) soldiers getting wrecked in the film's climactic (and par for the course) gigantic battle between ginormous armies.

I give it an extra half star for just how willing it is to go with the most preposterous choices every time, just look at how they choose to use unexpected explosions anytime it needed to spice up an info dump scene.

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