Aguahombre is the best DC movie made since Wonder Woman, which means almost nothing. The dashing, impish Momoa is a better poster child for the Justice League than Ben Affleck staring into the abyss, even if it’s not all that original a pose to take anymore–the meme “water Thor” has been making the rounds. In case you were one of the dozens of people who hasn’t seen Jason Momoa doing the haka in front of Ward theaters last week for the opening of Aquaman, here’s a photo (above). Since we talked about comic book movies last week, it’s worth digging up that criteria to see how this hombre did.
In general, it feels like Aquaman suffers from a content problem. His source material is pretty weak, so any adaptation of that material will either be forced to deviate too far or follow too closely. The biracial storyline is pretty prominent, which, as Wife puts it, is a signal for the evil characters, who exclusively call Aquaman a half-breed mongrel (similar warm and fuzzy feelings from the short film in Incredibles 2, Bao). But beyond that innovation, and some humanizing of the Black Manta character (who seems generally pretty bankrupt), there’s not a lot of substance to this two and a half hour romp through the ocean.
There are a lot of Cricket Rules (esp the “mission creep” trope) from the very beginning that get in the way of the Bad Guy doing whatever he wants to destroy the land people from the very beginning. Even despite all the rules, he almost immediately goes about sending massive tsunami to destroy coastal cities and later when negotiations fail, straight up assassinates his rivals with no repercussions.
On the hero’s side of things, Aquaman, as brother’s Wife comments, isn’t really interested in the “second half of life” story of its hero–the Jungian story of his journey. Instead, the film is bogged down by jarring flashbacks of single moment lessons that Aquaman learns as a child with no gesture toward development or reflection afterwards, which gives off a kind of Slumdog Millionaire vibe, like Aquaman is literally relying on twenty second clips of memory to make vital decisions in the present day. Maybe the most poignant development for Aquaman has to do with his realization concerning Black Manta. But the whole Black Manta thing itself is a little weird. He seems like a weirdly small secondary problem compared to the impending doom of the earth, easily dispatched after a few jumped roofs and some cracked bottles of wine Sicilian wine.
Mera’s wooing to accept the legitimacy of land-dwelling includes just two points of reference, the Sahara desert and a quaint town in coastal Sicily. Their travels never take them to the kinds of places on earth that make her question land-dweller’s lifestyles in the first place. Mera has some legitimate concerns about the downsides of consumerism that are never addressed. Also, the ease with which she’s able to find Aquaman in his childhood hometown makes one wonder why he wasn’t surrounded and murdered much earlier by the king’s goons.
The script is unevenly funny–sometimes intentional, as with the “fishman not fishboy” bit, and sometimes less so, as with the “Sea Master” bit, which sounded like a BDSM game than a real title people could roll with.
On superhero cultural amnesia: Aquaman definitely knows about Aquaman, but there’s a definite weird blindspot to the film where he acknowledges that the Justice League has just finished defeating a different threat to humanity together, but now no one can be found to lend him a hand in his life or death struggle against his half-brother. Not an (similarly) indestructible Superman or the world’s fastest man or Wonder Woman or the Batman can spare a moment to check in and see if he needs a hand.
While we’re talking about strange missteps, the beast guarding the trident that’s been missing for “aeons” seems shocked that Aquaman can understand her, even though she’s delivering some pretty select roasts of his family history and legitimacy. And once he explains the situation she backs off pretty quickly and tells him she’s sort of just back up and the trident itself will kill him if he’s not the true heir to the throne, so what’s with that redundancy? Why didn’t the trident let any of the ladies attempt to claim it for the decades that she/they were trapped there?
Also, pretty sure there’s an octopus playing drums at some point during a fight scene that we’re all just going to remain quiet on?
Villain is stronger than the hero: that seems wrong on two fronts. Black Manta is at a number of disadvantages even after his upgrades. The half-brother king breaks his own mother’s quintident early on but after Aquaman proves that some backwards skeleton king from two thousand years ago doesn’t melt his flesh off and he wants it more, Aquaman is able to best him in land-based combat.
Lastly, on the innovative powers front: solo comic book movies usually use the development of one’s powers as a stand in for their emotional growth, but Aquaman doesn’t really do much power growing in this film. He can swim fast, he has super strength, and literally nothing does more than stop him for a little, so it’s hard to see space for new powers or a new take on old powers, really.
Glen Weldon wrote a darling primer to the “bro-ification” of Aquaman for NPR. Sam Adams called Aquaman “the best Star Wars movie of the Year“.
Aquaman is worth it to see if only to watch Jason Momoa shirtless for a little bit, a guilty pleasure that will tide us all over until it’s time for 80s Wonder Woman to set a new record.
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