©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
A mere month ago, Marvel Studios’ most recent film, “The Marvels,” ended with not just one but two different callbacks to moments from decades earlier, one from the “X-Men” franchise and one from 2008’s “Iron Man.” Now, DC’s most recent work, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” ends with a painfully trite callback to “Iron Man” as well. A genre once infamous for its serialized storytelling method of promising bigger and better things down the road, with its eyes always (and perhaps detrimentally) on the horizon rather than the here and now, in 2023, has resulted exclusively to dwelling on its own past.
It’s not reflective, it’s not meditative, it’s just hack and dull and uninteresting, and demonstrative of the utter lack of exuberance or imagination left for these things, both from audiences and from the creative team involved in making them.
James Wan’s “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” is a truly heinous film, one that has some slight glimmers of hope within it, but ones that have been indisputably buried beneath an avalanche of rewrites, resorts, and creative overhauls. The result is a fitting farewell to the DCEU: a desperate final gasp rather than a triumphant victory.
TOP FIVE OF AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM
5. Wan’s Ambitions
James Wan is a fascinating filmmaker. One of the most formative auteurs of genre filmmaking over the past few decades, Wan has charted an unlikely path to resounding success which included creating franchise mainstays such as “Saw,” “Insidious,” and “The Conjuring,” as well as overseeing big tentpoles like “Furious 7” and “Aquaman.” The fascinating contradictions inherent within the man who gave audiences the camp horror delight that is “Malignant” are on full display in the sheer size and scope of “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” a film with gargantuan practical sets, multiple monstrous designs, and some of the hokiest ‘at-home’ baby-centric scenes ever committed to film.
So while the final product is marred often beyond recognition, I would be remiss not to mention that what Wan is aiming for here is deeply admirable in its oddness alone.
4. Weak Spot: Nothing New to Say
Having said that, good intentions do not translate to good execution in the case of “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.” In fact, one of the greatest weaknesses of the sequel is an issue that its DC predecessor, “Shazam: Fury of the Gods” also suffered from: just coasting on fumes from the original film.
The first “Aquaman” made a billion dollars (making it the most successful DCEU film in history), but it came out in 2018. The cultural landscape has changed so demonstrably since then that in order for this franchise to carry its own weight, it very much needed an ‘added value element’ for the sequel. Instead, “Aquaman 2” relies on the first film at every turn. Narrstively, thematically, emotionally, nearly every single beat in the movie only works if it assumes that the audience is overtly familiar with the first film, which I don’t think is a wise assumption.
The primary villain here is just the secondary villain from the first film. Every primary character featured here is from the first film, with no notable new additions aside from a green skeleton man’s spirit and a septopod, who each get about five minutes of screentime. There is nothing new here, it’s just more of the same.
3. Weak Spot: The Editing
The editing of “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” is atrocious in every conceivable way. The action is often muddled and completely lacking any sense of spatial awareness or clarity. There are entire swaths of crucial dialogue that are crudely ADR cut-and-pasted over the top of unrelated scenes. Gags, of both of a horrific and humorous nature, are given zero room to breathe and thus fall impeccably flat each time. There’s a conversation at one point that just cuts from one location to another mid-dialgoue with zero explanation and it’s migraine-inducing.
This is not even really a slight on longtime Wan editor Kirk Morri who’s credited here, but more an indictment of the post-production overhauling process this film went through multiple time under multiple different Warner Brothers regimes, resulting in an utter catastrophe of an edit, as mandated by completely conflicting studio mandates and test screening results.
2. Weak Spot: The Story
As a result of both the film having little new to say that the first film hadn’t already said and the aforementioned heinous editing, the story here is absolute nonsense.
The movie opens on a several minute-long montage all about Arthur Curry’s New life of being a father and the king of Atlantis, but neglects to do anything to actually show us him doing either of those things with any integrity or authenticity. So moments later, when Atlantis is attacked, it means literally nothing to us because it is the first time we’ve even seen the setting in this entire film. Similarly, there are entire sequences in the second act which are so unrelated to the primary thrust of the story and so devoid of any meaningful character beats that they could be exorcised from the project altogether with very little change.
“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” spends a lot of time talking about global warming and how everyone all nations just need to love one another, and making niche references to everything from “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” to “Lord of the Rings” to “King Kong,” but it has so little to actually say. Thematically, this is a work almost entirely devoid of any thought.
1. Weak Spot: That Final Scene
The final scene of “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” is obviously a late-in-the-game reshoot because it comes out of almost nowhere, means very little to the story or its characters, and is one of the most visually ugly sequences in the entire film.
By the time Momoa gets around to delivering a cheap riff on the infamous “Iron Man” line and then just haphazardly shuffling offscreen, leaving the final frame of the film to be an entirely unconvincing CGI backdrop in isolation, it’s an entirely deflating experience.
RGM GRADE
(D)
“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” feels so distinctly like a product of a bygone age. Written, shot, and edited over and over again over the course of several years, the end result is whiplash-inducing and so distinctly misplaced in the cinematic landscape of 2023.
The DC characters are slated to get a clean reboot in 2024, beginning with James Gunn’s “Superman: Legacy,” and I genuinely hope it’s great, but “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” leaves one with the distinct impression that this is a dead genre. From “Spider-Man: No Way Home” to “The Marvels” to this, the superhero genre has ceased looking to the future and begun just recycling the past, hoping that those nostalgic endorphin hits will be enough to keep audiences coming back. But time is an unrelenting river, always surging forward, and it feels distinctly like this genre and these projects are being well and truly buried beneath the weight of it.
