Potatoes Rating: Instant Mashed

Rating: 4/10 (22 December 2018)

Allow me to quote Raj from The Big Bang Theory. "I don't want to be Aquaman. He sucks. He sucks underwater. He sucks fish pee."
Oh, DC. I thought you'd learned! Wonder Woman was proof, wasn't it? All of the elements of great movie storytelling were present. It was wonderfully cast, carefully scripted. The film evolved at a crisp, but comfortably artistic pace, a tribute to careful editing. And when the magnificent amazon finally revealed her power at exactly the right moment as she stepped majestically onto the battlefield? Goosebumps.
So, how do you explain the obvious regression of Aquaman?
The casting is...meh. Jason Momoa is a fine, physical specimen of the fish man, but his hero is startlingly flat. The rest of the cast might work fine if this was a made for television movie, but it isn't. It's a major theatrical vehicle and DC has failed to bring in a suitable stable of supporting actors to carry the weight. And even though it's unfair to continually compare the DC universe to Marvel's, the parallel is unescapable. Ant Man, who ranks in the Marvel pantheon probably even lower than where Aquaman stands in the DC hero collection, carries two stand-alone movies effortlessly. Aquaman struggles from the beginning of the film, through its tedious center, to its final cheesy conclusion to justify the film's reason to live. Storytelling is the key, and where Wonder Woman earned a well-deserved A, Aquaman receives an equally merited D. Perhaps if the writers had chosen to meditate for two hours on the character's back story and built methodically toward a big reveal, I might be submitting a very different review. But instead the writing bumps along like an old roller coaster, jerking us through rickety rails of track, always in a hurry to get us to the steep climb and the furious fall to the end. None of it is satisfying. Instead of feeling like a big budget superhero film, the movie increasingly feels like a sad mishmash of Godzilla and Finding Nemo, although Nemo did a much better job of creating an interesting undersea world.
DC continues to give us heroes but can't seem to connect us to them. It's the primary flaw in the DC universe. It's characters are too cold and detached from the audience. It's a problem that will only be fixed through better movie storytelling.
I rank movies like I rank potatoes, because I love potatoes. Aquaman receives my Instant Mashed Potatoes ranking which roughly translates this way. They will do if you're in a hurry, but they generally suck. And in this case, Raj was right. These taters suck underwater.