‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’ REVIEW: Sympathy for the Abyss
‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’ REVIEW: Sympathy for the Abyss
Patrick Wilson and Jason Momoa as Orm and Aquaman respectively.
After sailing through troubled waters for more than a decade, the DC Extended Universe has finally sunk. Its tragic history started when a council of overlords hired a promising lad named Zack Snyder to lead their new shipping line upon seeing the success of their long-time rival’s operations. This promising lad turned out to be a man of wild ambitions and misguided excesses, recklessly scorching through the seas, spilling oil and muck along the routes. The maelstrom he caused created a mighty rift between his crew members; some took his madness as the work of a visionary; others saw it as mere folly that only obscured the ship’s direction. Regardless, the overlords had lost confidence in the promising lad when they earned lower than what was expected, leading them to apply creative restrictions and hire more co-captains to commandeer for its future endeavors. But the tragedies and misfortunes did not stop there.
In the ensuing years, the ship kept getting lost at their subsequent voyages as they lay waste to the oceans, no longer being able to glimpse what’s underneath the surface nor see the skies that were reflected on it during the times when the tides were blue. The captains made their own routes up as they went along. Some did fine, while others were disappointments. And the more rocks, cannonballs and icebergs that they had to endure, the more holes in the ship’s exteriors that they had to cover up. Without a definitive route to pave its future, a definitive protocol to batten down the hatches, and a definitive objective to maintain their course, the DCEU never became a tight ship. And soon, everyone came to the realization that it was a vessel doomed to sink, and that they just prolonged the inevitable.
James Wan’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the last breath of that sinking ship. It’s not the fate that both the filmmakers and the audiences wanted, but with interests dwindling and great damage already done to the ship’s hull in the past, the situation is just out of their control.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Manta
Fans, who are aware of the recent controversial developments in both the internal management of Warner Bros. Discovery and the production of the film itself that are too plenty to cover, do not see the point of watching a multi-billion dollar franchise end with a whimper. And upon seeing this long-awaited sequel to the now five-year-old billion-dollar original, all I can think of as the credits roll is how much I feel completely numb to the entire experience.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I do not consider myself a DC fan. I would say that I am very ambivalent towards the superhero genre in general. But it really says a lot when even watching the film in IMAX—one of the best possible moviegoing formats—does not change the fact that it is all noise and little substance, and the substance that the film does offer is still not enough for audiences to care about the senseless fireworks assaulting their senses.
For starters, The Lost Kingdom tries to be a lot of things and fails when executing them: it attempts to tackle climate change and the environmental dangers it poses, but the film only dips its toes in the pool and chickens out. It also wants to be a buddy comedy between Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and his younger, antagonistic half-brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson), but the film is way too focused on the action, the cockroaches, the cheeseburgers and the snarky zingers, instead of something genuine and honest.
Furthermore, the film makes a habit of rushing through the details of its hastily developing world populated with all these different characters who are engaged in a large-scale plot without allowing both the audiences and characters to recollect their thoughts. Refusing any breathing room, the film jumps from point to point, beat after beat, exhausting itself to the point of emotional obscurity. Characters remain as one-dimensional archetypes with obvious motivations, and the movie fails to make any of their internal changes feel groundbreaking.
It’s this type of carelessness in the storytelling department that makes audiences doubt whether the people involved in this film are really trying to make an effort to deliver a worthwhile cinematic experience. Almost the entire ensemble has the presence of someone who has been forced to show up for work. Only Momoa appears passionate about the project and continues to deliver his "dudebro" energy from the first film. Yet, even in that, his carefree approach to the character becomes overbearing and proves detrimental to the emotional crescendos the film tries desperately to earn.
As a result, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom feels like a haze of ideas flashing before one’s eyes without understanding and empathizing with their significance. A gesture, a hug, a punch, a stab, a laser beam—none of them hold any weight when lifeless action figures perform these in barely tangible and effects-heavy set-pieces. Even when director James Wan does his signature camera tricks, the entire thing feels too artificial to look cool and exciting.
At the end of the day, I find myself asking: if James Wan is able to make something worthwhile out of this bad situation, would it change things? And I end up thinking: No matter how stainless the final nail in the coffin is, the cadaver being buried will never get to fulfill its promises.
