AQUAMAN is greatly confused whether to make us laugh or to makes us feel!!!

Rating: 4/10 (16 December 2018)

"Call me the ocean master!" King Orm (Patrick Wilson), the villain in James Wan's Aquaman, portentously shouts at the outset of the film's climactic scene. Warner Bros.'s latest attempt to shift its DC brand away from the dour machoism that marked (and marred) such films as Man of Steel embraces high fantasy, but for Wan and screenwriters David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall, this turns out to mostly mean having characters proclaim their silly comic book names as assertively as possible. "I'm Black Manta!" growls Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the film's other supervillain. Instead of a deep, detailed world, what Wan's undersea fantasy constructs is a series of scenes, often divertingly colorful and busy to a fault, that seem to dare the viewer to mock the world of comics' most risible superhero.
This defensive posture was evident in the calculated decision to cast the at once beautiful and threatening Jason Momoa as the man who talks to fish. Aquaman, whose unassuming alter ego is Arthur Curry, is introduced in the film with a fight on board a Russian submarine, a sequence in which Momoa, in close-up, practically snarls directly into the camera as he hurls pirates into bulkheads. That'll teach the audience to make fun of Aquaman.

But there's plenty more in Aquaman that will provoke unintentional laughter. It's less that the world presented here-with its fish-human hybrids, legendary kings, and coveted tridents-is inherently funny, and more that the film rushes through its story at such a breakneck pace that viewers never have a chance to settle into it, to see it as a lived-in universe. After a while, it all begins to feel arbitrary. We have little time to process the functioning of water-based laser rifles before we're introduced to fish people in brightly colored togas, or to a stone-faced Willem Defoe wearing a onesie and a top-knot.
The film's origin story resembles that of mythological superheroes like Thor and Wonder Woman, in which a superpowered being awkwardly adjusts to an unfamiliar environment. (One is tempted to call Aquaman a fish-out-of-water story.) Arthur is the child of Queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), part of the ruling family of the fabled underwater city Atlantis, and a human man (Temuera Morrison). After his mother is forced to return to Atlantis, Arthur grows up with his father in Maine, isolated from the undersea kingdom that is his birthright, until Mera (Amber Heard) arrives on shore to convince him to return and prevent the war Orm and her father, Nereus (Dolph Lundgren), are planning against the humans on the surface. Although, and in standard hero's-journey fashion, Arthur initially refuses Mera's call for help, he's soon compelled to take up her cause after a tidal wave nearly kills his father.

A bounty of CG-heavy action scenes follow, from hand-to-hand combat in an underwater colosseum, to a chase through a Sicilian village, to a full-fledged confrontation of armies on the ocean floor. At its best, the film's underwater action, with its traveling shots that zoom through crowds of fantastical marine species and past moss-encrusted classical ruins, are vibrant, aesthetically engrossing spectacle. A few shots in particular stand out for their compositional flair, such as Mera and Arthur's climactic kiss against the chaotic backdrop of a raging undersea battle, and one which frames the couple swimming toward the bottom of the frame as a horde of Lovecraftian fish-monsters coalesce behind them and give pursuit.
At its weakest moments, however, the film offers a parade of ocean-floor vistas that evoke the substanceless world-building of George Lucas's second Star Wars trilogy, a supersaturated digital landscape of smooth surfaces and expensive-looking designs. Aquaman exacerbates-almost by design-some of the worst tendencies of today's superhero movies. The weightlessness of fights rendered with CG is compounded by that of fights between people suspended in water, and the sexlessness of superhero movies is only emphasized by the perfunctory romance between two leads who seem to have been cast largely because they look good dripping wet.

The best point of comparison for Aquaman is Black Panther, another superhero movie about a king of a forgotten realm reclaiming his throne. But whereas Ryan Coogler's surprisingly affecting superhero film restored weight to both the choreography and the drama of the genre, Aquaman remains adrift, so much fantasy flotsam and jetsam floating before our eyes.