When it comes to reviewing movies, I tend to try to wrap up my thoughts about a film in a particular, easy to explain way. They range from bad to good, along a typically linear spectrum. I’m certainly not alone in this regard. Whether it was Siskel and Ebert awarding thumbs up, a local writer awarding stars, or modern internet ratings on things like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDB, or Letterboxd, we tend to think about things on that sort of scale. We have a mental slider, an internal speedometer of sorts, that lets us know exactly how we’re feeling about a movie, TV series, video game, hotel stay, meal, board game, or, well, anything. You can rate anything these days. When things rub us the wrong way, the slider moves to the left, toward zero. When we’re impressed, it slides right. It’s a scale that we’re all comfortable with.
Aquaman put a three-pronged hole right through my scale.
The absolute bonkers-ness of the latest entry in the typically dour DC Expanded Universe is central to any review of the film. I’m going to talk about some spoilers here. These aren’t spoilers to the plot – this plot cannot be spoiled unless, perhaps, you’ve never seen a superhero film of any kind or even read a comic book. No, the spoilers that matter are the details that make it bonkers, and they must be discussed.
It’s hard not to sound like SNL’s Stefon when you tell a friend about Aquaman. This movie has everything – a drumming octopus, underwater rivers of lava, a land in the earth’s core that inexplicably has a sky, romantic flute-playing, at least 3 scenes that end in explosion-wipes, a guitar riff that plays each time we reach a certain zoom point on Aquaman, and wine bullets – you know, that’s that thing when lethal projectiles are MADE OF WINE. To try to explain any of this or how it fits into the plot would be pointless. None of it matters, and it’s all there because, well, something has to be. This film is off its rocker, and here’s the single most important thing: it’s completely aware that it is.
First, the plot. We see Arthur Curry’s (Jason Momoa) origin, told quickly early on and finished through some flashbacks interspersed with current action. He’s the first-born son of the Queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman) after she falls in love with a fisherman. Being half-human, he is hidden from the Queen’s underwater husband, made to grow up on the land. The Queen returns to Atlantis and has another son, Orm (Patrick Wilson), who eventually becomes king. Orm, because we surface-dwellers have polluted the sea, wants to declare war on the land. To do so, he’ll need to have allegiance from 3 other underwater kingdoms. One concerned citizen from one of those neighboring kingdoms (Amber Heard) heads to the land to convince Arthur to claim his throne and prevent a truly global war. Everything pretty much plays out as expected from there.
There’s so much about this movie that is abjectly terrible, you really start to think about the decisions – and it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than it’s all intentional. After all, the filmmakers understood that certain lines of serious dialogue would garner laughter from the crowd, right? “Where I come from, the sea wipes our tears away.” “Here we feel them.” Two professional thespians had to speak that nonsense to one another. When Aquaman asks, after yet another guitar riff announces his arrival onto a submarine, “Permission to come aboard?”, this wasn’t an accident. There’s so much to laugh at in Aquaman, you have to assume this was meant to sound like comic book dialogue, perhaps one of the most faithful comic book movies to the form in that regard.
As a result, Aquaman was a blast. There’s a certain thrill of sitting in a theater, wondering what ridiculously dumb thing might happen next. It’s all so over-the-top bad, from the costume designs (one underwater king looks like Jim Carrey’s The Mask while a major villain looks more or less like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs) to the soundtrack (when Aquaman goes to the Sahara, the movie provides the most hilariously stupid song choice to announce his arrival), it’s just an incredible amount of fun. And, after those first five minutes where you wonder, “Is this movie being serious?”, you finally get your answer when Dolph Lundgren shows up as an underwater king. Thor got Anthony Hopkins to play its wise old king. Thor is attempting to be a straight-faced movie. This has Ivan Drago riding a seahorse, avoiding explosions. This silliness is key. If you felt earnestness from these choices, it would be terribly uncomfortable to continue watching. Instead, it kind of enables you to laugh along with the absurdity on the screen.
That being said, there are some moments where director James Wan and his team actually do take a chance to show off. There’s a fight scene that features two fights, one on rooftops and the other at ground level, and it’s shot in a really cool manner. It manages to move from one to the other without letting us forget about the last one, and we know where everything is taking place, relatively. The underwater fight scenes are reminiscent of George Lucas’ space battles in the Star Wars prequels (possibly because there are lasers here as well, because why not). They are kind of breathtaking in their scope, a relentless barrage of sights and colors on your eyes. It is, at times, a very pretty film.
Aquaman also sounds absolutely great. Perhaps it owes part of this to my seeing the film in a Dolby Atmos Theater, but the film shows off its sound effects just as much as its visual effects. From underwater blasts and voice effects to the hum from a brandished trident, there’s so much to take in aurally.
So, how did Aquaman break my scale? It is simultaneously brilliant and awful. How can something be a 4 star movie when the performances and dialogue are among the worst you’ve seen or heard in a movie? And how can something be a 1 star movie when it delights you so? I’ll leave the stars to the heavens. Aquaman is delightfully entertaining, and that’s really all that matters. Go see this big, loud movie in the biggest, loudest theater you can find, and revel in its stupidity, just like this goat:
Is It Watchlist-Worthy? Hell yes. It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s dumb fun.