Better than it has any right to be

Rating: 8/10 (31 March 2020)

This was fin-tastic! In my "Justice League" review last year, I praised the way they handled Aquaman, and made him cool instead of the butt of the joke that he's been for the past 75 years. He's just as cool here. From the opening battle to the final battle, his awesomeness has no end. The story is pretty good, though I did feel like I'd seen a lot of it before, but it's such a fun journey, that I didn't care. The action sequences, at least when they're grand scale battles with wide shots or pan-shots, look gorgeous. The hand-to-hand combat stuff, not so much. The way those are shot made me feel like I was watching someone play the "Injustice" games. Some of the dialogue is pretty corny, but that's the case with most DC films lately. They're trying to be live-action Saturday morning cartoons. I have no problem with that in the action aspect, but some of the dialogue really needed some re-writes. I usually complain about CGI in Warner Bros. movies saying how it always looks like a trailer for a PS2 game from 2004, but that's not the case here. Ok, there were some parts underwater that were very obviously green screen, but those were few and far between, at least not to the degree of "Wonder Woman" where I could tell when things were CGI. Most of the cast is pretty good, but I do need to complain just a little bit about Amber Heard. During the fight scenes, she was great, but anytime she had dialogue, her lips came up into a sort of sneer, like she was smelling rotten eggs. It didn't matter what the line was. It always looked like that, and it was distracting, and a bit funny. A lot of times it also sounded like she was trying to imitate Scarlett Johansson with the line delivery. In fact, if I closed my eyes, I could almost mistake her for Scarlett Johansson. The movie also had a lot of unnecessary figurative hand-holding for the audience. Every time there was a new location it felt the need to tell you where you were, despite the fact that most people could figure it out from visual context clues. It's obvious we're in Atlantis, it's obvious this is the Sahara. You don't need to have the text on the screen tell us. We're not dumb. We can figure it out in the first 5 seconds of seeing the location. By far the best part of this movie is the directing and cinematography. The wide shots are just gorgeous and the non hand to hand battles are well directed too. For a movie called 'Aquaman' where the main character's power is talking to fish, this was a lot better than it had any right to be. This is definitely, surprisingly, one of DC's best.
Grade: B 8/10 4/5 stars