Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom

Well, it’s better than the first Aquaman, at least. The sequel is a giant mess of noise and color that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but some individual pieces are lightly amusing. It’s not quite the complete dredge that was the first film’s road picture that never worked on any level. This is more like five different movies in one, none of which work, but there are some small moments here and there. Bleh. It’s still crap, though.

So, Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) is the Aquaman, and he spends half his time on land with his very small child with Mera (Amber Heard) with his father Thomas (Temuera Morrison) taking care of the baby whenever he has to go into the oceans and be all king of the Oceans and stuff. Like, oh my gosh. Did you know that being king isn’t about being awesome but politics? Jeez, how awful for him. Well, at least he throws himself in gladiator rings with giant sea monsters to relieve his stress sometimes.  Meanwhile, Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is still really angry at Aquaman for killing his father in the first act of the first film, and he comes across the Black Trident that possesses him with an ancient sea green king with dreams of destroying the world while giving Black Manta the means for taking vengeance upon Aquaman.

There really is no center to this story. It is just an excuse for very expensive special effects to flash on the screen very quickly while Momoa quips and Abdul-Mateen scowls. Black Manta attacks Atlantis, causing a bunch of damage, Aquaman decides to go look for his younger brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson) out of prison on his own by going undercover with a squid as backup. They have to go and try to figure out what Black Manta wants (revenge/end of the world) while expensive special effects surround them (gosh, the hair underwater ALWAYS looks terrible).

I think where I have the most (it’s a low bar) fun in the film is the buddy-travelogue nature between Aquaman and Orm. They have decent chemistry and work well with each other. It’s amusing, slightly. Randall Park also has a smallish part as an employee of Black Manta where he has little more to do than try to act funny in between moments where he explains obvious things to the plot.

The back half of the film is an extended action sequence where the two sides come to blows in epic, messy, special effects fashion, predicated on Black Manta needing royal Atlantean blood for some kind of sacrifice to awaken the ancient king, kidnapping the Aquaman baby to get it done. The film’s lack of center, though, comes to play here where the film isn’t about anything at all. It’s just a series of events. I thought for a while that the end result was going to be Curry giving up the throne to his brother because Curry hates being king so much. And yet, it never even comes close to fulfilling that promise. The movie is so dumb that it looks at Curry hating being king, only needing constant action, and ends up with him still being king.

Oh, it doesn’t actually end with that. It ends with climate change is bad, which is…okay. There are some random lines of dialogue about Black Manta’s plan releasing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but it’s so disassociated from Aquaman’s personal journey of…learning that being king can be awesome if he has an enemy and can go to war? This movie is a mess, and it really wouldn’t surprise me if it was victim to the rumored series of reshoots.

So, it has a few amusing little pieces, but the whole is a hodgepodge of half-cooked ideas that get abandoned, discarded, and ignored for long stretches, if not completely after they’re introduced. The special effects sure do look expensive, just like in the first film, but they’re also a mess without any real sense of beauty or aesthetics. It’s just busy and fast, but Warner Bros. sure did spend a whole lot of money on it. We can see it on screen!

So, I’d say it’s an improvement over the first, but it’s still kind of just terrible. It’s not much of an improvement, is what I’m saying.

Rating: 1/4