A typical DC movie

Rating: 4/10 (15 October 2019)

A big part of the movie happens underwater but almost nothing looks or sounds underwater. Most of the CGI looks like a rainbow puked on it and sound design is a lot more sci-fi than underwater. Basically it feels like unicorns flying in space shooting lasers at each other in slow motion. The CGI overall appears very outdated and disconnected from the real-world footage. People's voices don't change in any way to give the feeling that they are underwater - instead all of the lines sound like clean studio recordings. At one point I thought they are still regularly underwater when in fact they were in an air bubble of sorts, and the only thing that gave it away was gravity.
What is watery, though, is the watered down action in general. Everything is desperately trying to be epic all the time, but fails miserably and ends up causing no emotion whatsoever. That also goes for everything else besides the action. There is music absolutely all the time, and the music sounds exactly the same as in other DC movies (where there is also music all the time). Almost feels as if they have just bought a pile of generic stock music to fill in for the conversation bits to keep things dramatic enough. The camera also zooms, pans, flies or makes circles almost all the time. When you put all this together the end result is that nothing has any impact on the viewer because of the complete lack of contrast between calm and action-filled or dramatic moments.
It's also a pity to see good actors give underwhelming performances under bad direction and trying to work with a story and characters completely devoid of any substance. In essence the story is one that has been written many times before in many forms, and everything you expect to happen, happens. There is no element of surprise, no plot-twist, nothing. Only a big bag of clichés strung together using bad jokes and generic lines that are so obvious they become mere background noise.
Yet these below-mediocre mass-produced superhero films keep selling so very well - and even get decent reviews. It indicates that people in genreal do not demand anything more from their action. Rarely is an action movie a masterpiece, but it's not at all impossible to make them entertaining or even thought-provoking. Aquaman was none of those, but to be fair I didn't hate it either. It wasn't disappointing since I wasn't expecting much to begin with. It was just... meh.