DC Takes a Step Back in AquaMEH

Rating: 5/10 (25 December 2018)

When I talk about movies I didn't like, I like to start with the positives before I start complaining nonstop. I'll talk more about Jason's portrayal of Aquaman but the biggest thing Aquaman has going for it is his casting in the central role. He wills this movie past some of its worst moments. I liked the design of some of the creatures of the deep, the CGI is all over the place but there were moments in the movie that the look of Atlantis and the underwater kingdoms were pretty cool. The action set pieces also had their moments, there were some fleeting bits in the final fight that caught my attention. I also thought there were minor character turns that made the characters easier to relate to (the one that comes to mind was when Arthur and Orm were about to do battle in the Ring of Fire and Arthur mentions that all he wanted as a kid was to meet his half brother and tell him that he wasn't alone and that they could get through it together).
There aren't going to be many positives for the rest of this review. The first thing that I didn't like from Aquaman was how the movie expected you to be emotionally invested in things without any setup. So much of the dialogue (much of it coming from Mera played by Amber Heard) is just an exposition dump, the movie shows you very little but insists on describing everything. Orm wants a war with the surface people because of the damage they are doing to the ocean, maybe showing us some of the problems the surface people are causing would bring the audience around to seeing things from his point of view instead of some CGI flashes? Orm's goal is to bring most of the oceanic kingdoms together but they have deep seeded grudges against the Atlanteans, could we see some of the problematic backstory that caused the clans to break apart? Why should we be invested in these things when we were just introduced to them and have no context? Seeing some of that would have been better than the whole desert sequence which had nothing interesting except more terrible one-liners. Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is just a hired gun for the enemy when you boil it down, why do we need to spend so much time with him when you could cut him out of the movie completely? Lastly, why should we care about the budding romantic relationship between Arthur (Jason Momoa) and Mera when the characters have no emotional connection when she shows up and they haven't spent more than a couple of days together? I could keep going but the movie acts like we already have a deep connection to Arthur Currie and Atlantis but minus a few moments in Justice League, this is their introduction.
About halfway through Aquaman, I realized if the cast didn't include so many actors and actresses I liked, I really would have turned hard on this movie. Jason Momoa has a bunch of charisma, he's easy to like and that carries over into this movie. There are times where his enthusiasm is so infectious that I started to get distracted from how cringe-worthy his dialogue was. He can't save the movie with the terrible jokes and lines he has but he did what he could. I felt sorry for Amber Heard when I watched Aquaman. She seemed like she was one big break from hitting the big time for a while there (to reach the Jennifer Lawrence, Brie Larson or even Anne Hathaway level) and this still isn't the right vehicle. Just like Jason, she's saddled with bad dialogue and an uninteresting romantic subplot, but she gives it her all. I thought Patrick Wilson gave the most committed performance, he's a regular collaborator with James Wan and while he's far from a memorable villain, he really delivers his lines like he was reciting Shakespeare. He's the type of actor I like even when he's not in great stuff and that continues in Aquaman. Temuera Morrison was my next favourite character, the best parts of the movie are when he and Momoa are hanging out in the beginning and they really feel like they could be father and son or at minimum friends. Nicole Kidman, Dolph Lundgren and Willem Dafoe showed up for work but just went a little over the bare minimum when it comes to the energy in their performances. The most over-the-top acting comes from Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Manta, I almost was laughing when he had his big dramatic moment early in the film. Manta is a hugely unnecessary character in this however, so I'll give him credit for doing the best job he could even if he was chewing the scenery.
I'm not a DC hater I really enjoyed Wonder Woman and I enjoyed Suicide Squad despite its peaks and vallies in quality. I also like BvS, it got better with the ultimate cut but its a mixed bag of a movie. I went into Aquaman with low expectations, but the decent Rotten Tomatoes score gave me hope. I don't think this movie was as all over the place as Suicide Squad or Batman v Superman. It stayed at one level consistently, but it was consistently mediocre or bad. The likeable cast couldn't save this and while I didn't outright hate it, between the terrible dialogue, the embarrassing score (covering Africa with Pitbull? Really?) and the script elements that feel way too familiar or were covered better by better movies (think about the similarities between the arcs of Atlanna and Janet Van Dyne in Ant-Man and the Wasp), this is a disappointment and when I left the theatre with my friend and we were laughing at the movie. This is a 5/10 and I feel like I'm being generous.