The SFX make this movie, and Jason Momoa is great. Nothing else works.

Rating: 4/10 (31 December 2018)

By now, I think everyone knows DC can't make a decent superhero movie without Chris Nolan or a woman in charge. It is the Batman trilogy, Wonder Woman, and then we have to travel back in time decades to Tim Burton's Batman films and Richard Donner's Superman.
What is the difference between DC and Marvel? How come there is such a gap in their movies as far as writing? The SFX make Aquaman a tolerable film to watch, and that is basically it. Jason Momoa has charisma, but the dialogue is so expositional, so on the nose, so boring and irritating, for every character.
And where is the character development? Jason Momoa's Arthur/Aquaman has an arc, but everyone else is one-dimensional. In Wonder Woman, we saw what could be added to the story when the supporting cast have backstories: the Arab with Hollywood dreams but he is the wrong color, the Native American who has had everything stolen from him by people who look like the leads, the PTSD sniper who can't shoot anymore.
A saving grace for this film, I think, would have been a little more focus on the pollution affecting ocean life, the damage to the environment. What is wrong with raising the IQ level of a blockbuster film, so it isn't just popcorn entertainment?
Yet Aquaman is almost all visual effects (and I guess it has to be since it mostly happens in a fictional underwater world). There is barely a coherent story: a special trident, the surface world is evil, war must be waged. The mythology doesn't work for me, and once again the dialogue is painful.