If you are a visual artist who loves the big, sweeping tableaus, that is the big strength of Aquaman (2018), and you may want to see it. But if you’re not, if, like me, you’re a story junkie, then skip it. Bad audio, a mundane plot which is all about the action and only gives a superfluous nod to the question of how being a hero or villain affects humans, the plot bounds soggily from set-piece to set-piece, creating good guys, bad guys, and little kids caught in the middle as needed, rather than organically from the origins of the scenario. A whole lot of acting phoned in from home. Sure, the big ‘A’ has a sense of humor early on, but why is he impervious to bullets? And what’s with the pirate sub?
It didn’t help that during the battle scenes we spotted intruding Martian war machines (perhaps yet another version of War Of The Worlds was filming on the studio lot next door), and a big old kaiju that was guarding the sacred trident that Arthur, yes, Arthur (think of a good Brit accent, no less) has to take from his grasp in order to win his throne. Yeeeeccccch.
But here’s the big condemnation: part way through I started considering how this could have been improved in a surprising, yet logical, manner. That’s a bad sign. For the record, when one of the bad guys, clad in a suit that kept the water in so he could breath, crashes through the roof of a house on the island of Corfu, he earns himself a good old-fashioned death-glare from the grandmama who happened to be there, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if she turned into one of those old Greco-Roman Fates who snipped the strings of humanity, and really nailed him with a death glare?
Yeah, this was a bad, boring movie. Too little plot, too much fighting.
