Let’s just get this out of the way fast: Aquaman is not good.
It’s worse than someone reheating fish in the office microwave.
It’s Green Lantern bad.
It’s just too long and too much. Too long as in almost two-and-a-half hours. Too much as in a candy-coated CGI kaleidoscope that leaves each of the realms of the Seven Seas virtually indistinguishable from the next.
Worse, it lacks even the most basic building blocks of a good movie, and doesn’t seem to care.
Regardless of what I say, you’re still going to go see it, but when you do, remember these four reasons Aquaman is breathtakingly awful:
1. You don't get an origin story.
Don’t expect to learn anything about Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa), the man who becomes Aquaman. His mother was a queen from Atlantis, he was named after a hurricane and as a kid, at the aquarium, he learned he could talk to fish. That’s what you get. In the first 10 minutes.
And that’s it.
It’s the same for Black Manta, who is Aquaman’s biggest rival in the comics, basically the Joker to his Batman. Want to know what you find out about him?
He’s a pirate. From a long line of pirates.
No, really, that’s it.
2. You don't understand his super-powers.
You’re probably thinking, I know this: He swims really fast and talks to fishes.
And he does do both of those in the movie. But he also lifts a submarine out of the ocean with ease. And gets shot point-blank. And nearly stabbed, but the blade can’t penetrate his skin. Later, he jumps out of a plane and plummets to Earth with nary a scratch.
Wait, Aquaman’s bulletproof?
If I had never read a single comic, and had no idea that Curry’s skin is super-resistant to injury because of the depths that he’s able to swim, I’d think I was watching a Superman movie.
It’s inconceivable why no one bothers to explain any of this at any point in the movie. There’s even a scene where Curry tells another character, I have no idea what I can do.
And that’s a problem.
3. It's so bad you just want it to end.
I can’t tell you the last time I checked my watch while watching a movie, but I will tell you I checked my watch three times during Aquaman.
Trust me, you’re going to have a lot of time to think, so here’s how to make it fun.
One way is to think of a better comic book film or TV show that each of the actors in Aquaman has starred in.
Here’s mine:
Patrick Wilson — Watchmen
Graham McTavish — Preacher
Nicole Kidman — Batman Forever
Djimon Hounsou — Guardians of the Galaxy
Willem Dafoe — Spider-Man
Dolph Lundgren — The Punisher (Yep, I said it)
Another is to consider why so much of this movie feels familiar. Spoiler alert: Aquaman steals a lot of shit from better movies.
Atlantis is basically Pandora from Avatar; the Challenge of the Kings fight between Curry and Orm (Patrick Wilson) is basically Black Panther underwater; Curry’s quest to find the Lost Trident of Atlan starts off as Raiders of the Lost Ark and winds up ripping off the ending of The Fifth Element; and even the giant underwater Beast of Legend looks like the result of a one-night stand between the Cloverfield monster and a kaiju from Pacific Rim.
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4. When it gets good, it's about to get bad.
To be honest, there are actually two good sequences in Aquaman. Sadly, both of them precede the two worst sequences in Aquaman.
The first comes when Curry is drinking with his dad and a burly biker approaches and asks, “You that fish-boy from TV?”
“It’s fish-man,” Curry says, standing. “What do you want?”
The biker pulls out his cellphone — “Can we get a picture?” — and leans in for a selfie.
That’s immediately followed by Curry driving his drunk dad home when the single-lamest tsunami wave in CGI history appears and swallows his truck, almost drowning the dad.
The second good scene is a direct homage to H.P. Lovecraft, and involves Curry and Mera (Amber Heard) battling a horde of Dagon-like trench monsters on a rickety fishing trawler as they try to reach The Hidden Sea.
Which is immediately followed by them entering a wormhole and actually reaching The Hidden Sea, which is at the Earth’s core, and there they find dinosaurs, waterfalls and Queen Atlanna (Kidman).
Yes, I said dinosaurs.
Seriously.
Fucking dinosaurs.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
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This article appears in Dec 20-27, 2018.