Aquaman (2018)

 

Genre: Action/ Fantasy

Time: 2h 23mins

Director: James Wan

Quick Summary: Arthur Curry, the human-born heir to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis, goes on a quest to prevent a war between the worlds of ocean and land.

Man, they really like slow motion in this.

You know I'm not sure what I found strange more, the sheer amount of slow-motion scenes or the sheer amount of scenes when Jason Momoa is shirtless, or the sheer amount of scenes where explosions just randomly happen to interrupt conversations. 

I have zero comments about Amber Heard and refuse to acknowledge her. 

I'll be honest, the first hour got me. While it wasn't brilliant, It felt like it was going to be silly and not very serious in a good cheesy type of way. For someone like Aquaman, it needed to be fun, especially being played by Jason Moma, but sadly they chose to be serious with it which resulted in a poorly toned film.

Weirdly enough, something I liked about this is how pretty the underwater scenes were. A literal riot of vibrant and neon colour across the screen. The whole aesthetic of the underwater world was actually really good, I can tell a lot of thought went into that side of the film. From the costumes to the battle gear and weapons, I was very impressed. Also, to add to this the camerawork and scene transitions were actually good too! The camera follows as enemies get flipped over, thrown tridents transition from present to past, and then back again, and there are a lot of really fluid captures in the battle scenes. Outside of this underwater world, it looked terrible. There's one scene in the desert and Jesus, it hurts your eyes seeing how bad the green screen sky is under extremely harsh lighting. 

A lot of this is extremely predictable too once it gets past the whole set-up. I won't spoil them, but I think even your mum will be able to guess what happens throughout. The jokes get less and less funny the more the film goes on. I think if it wasn't Jason doing them, they wouldn't be funny at all. It's almost like a 14-year-old kid wrote them, trying to seem all cool with his cool original character he's bad, who is so invincible and strong and the chosen one. I wish they put some points into intelligence instead of strength/charisma. 

While this is a good origin story, how it's presented feels a little backwards. The younger years of Aquaman are shown in the middle of the film. Maybe this is a personal taste, but I feel like we should have seen these scenes before as they kind of disjoint the pacing a little. As well, I do think this film (plus the newest one which I haven't seen) should have been turned into a potential trilogy. I wanted more of the set-up, less of the middle part which feels like it was ripped straight out of Indiana Jones, and more of the end. I think his battle to become Aquaman is too quick compared to the rest of the film. 

While writing this, I somehow forgot about the villain that hunts Aquaman down. He was that forgettable, the main villain of this slipped my mind. It was a silly reason too he was a villain, as Aquaman stopped the guy's father from killing even more people than he did, so he chose to seek revenge. The guy is pretty useless too, aside from the 10 seconds where he gets a laser. 

While this isn't as bad as other DC films I have seen, this isn't great. I found it to be really boring at times, especially in the middle (probably due to someone whose last name rhymes with turd). The jokes end up falling flat or are just plain bad over time. This is okay at best, I wouldn't rush to watch this again, but I wouldn't rule out never watching it again.

5/10