A good hour after Nicole Kidman (playing Aquaman’s mother Atlanta) is rescued by a surface-dweller, falls in love with him, bears a child, and kills super-powered soldiers who break through their humble abode’s walls, we find ourselves in the undersea kingdom of Atlantis — a land straight from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Here, Aquaman (Jason Mamoa), a hero from DC Comics, is in the middle of a winner-takes-all fight to claim his mantle as king. Waiting for him to win is this kingdom’s stand-in for Ariel: Mara (Amber Heard) — Aquaman’s red-haired future-wife dressed in a pink dress, like a Disney princess. As if Mara weren’t Ariel-y enough, an octopus is briefly seen playing drums with its tentacles. However, before a crab started singing Under the Sea, director James Wan takes us back to reality. It would have been better if he had gone ahead with the crab.
Wan’s Aquaman, which takes place after the events of Justice League (2017), has something or the other to do with our extensively-tattooed sea-hero finding a fabled trident, thwarting his half-brother’s plan to start a war with the surface world, and eventually reclaiming his throne.
Most of the stuff Wan and writers David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall throw at the audience is brighter and chirpier than DC’s previous films; it is also as unnecessarily uber-expensive. Everything is fake, from indoor sets, to glowing sunsets, to the Sahara desert, the rooftops of Sicily (which get redecorated to rubble in a fight), to the “majestic” undersea kingdoms, its denizens and their constantly waving hair because of the underwater current. The battles are explosive as expected, given the action’s necessity to punch the teeny story up. The brawling’s actual need, however, is as warranted as the crick in the neck one gets after trying to stay-up through the unending barrage.
Wan shoots this movie flatter than a pancake — or in our geography’s case, a roti without the puff (the kind you get when NOT finished on the direct fire). One intermittently feels a nagging sensation that the producers only stumbled on to a streamlined narrative after extensively shuffling the scenes in the editing room. Bits and pieces, such as actor Willem Dafoe’s flashback, feel awkward and forced (Dafoe plays his mentor, if you were wondering); but then again, so does this entire movie.
Published in Dawn, ICON, December 16th, 2018