Aquaman 2

I did not go to see this film in the cinema. I waited to buy it on disc until it was a bit cheaper. I did not have high expectations, but I hoped that there would be more giant war crabs.

My lack of expectations was not disappointed. My hope for crabs was.

To be fair, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was probably doomed from the start. There was, of course, the huge fuss over Amber Heard. I’m pleased to see that she kept her role as Mera, though she did quite literally spend much of the film holding the baby. Now that we have the Blake Lively story to consider as well, maybe people will re-examine their opinions of Heard, and not just assume that beautiful women are guilty until proved innocent above and beyond all reasonable doubt.

Then there was the take-over of the DC Movie Universe by James Gunn. There is, we understand, to be a complete re-boot. No one quite knows what that means, but there is no guarantee that anyone who had roles in the past will keep them. Jason Momoa has apparently been cast as an anti-hero character in the forthcoming Supergirl movie, so Aquaman’s place in the Gunn regime must be in doubt.

The film’s creative team probably knew they were marooned on a raft in some lost corner of the DC universe with little chance of rescue. They may have decided to ham things up a bit. After all, they had a star who is very good at doing just that.

James Wan, the Director, talks enthusiastically in the extras about how they worked hard to recreate the look and atmosphere of the 1950s pulp era Aquaman comics. I’m sure they did, but was that of any interest to the cinema-going public? I suspect not.

As to the script, it is about as corny as they come. The bad guys threaten Atlantis and the only way that King Arthur (they never call him that in the movies, but that’s obviously his title) can foil them is by enlisting the help of his half-brother, Orm, who is currently in prison for doing lots of bad things in the first movie. It is a bromance team-up movie, except of course they can’t actually fall in love because they are half-brothers. To add to this, there is the small matter of the bad guys wanting to sacrifice Arthur & Mera’s baby son for purposes of Evil Blood Magic.

Adding to the corniness is the fact that the baddest of the bad guys lies sleeping under the ice in Antarctica surrounded by some suspiciously Lovecraftian monsters. I don’t think we can blame the scriptwriters for this. As I understand it, the whole Lost Kingdom concept was taken from the comics, so whoever wrote them was presumably the Lovecraft fan.

Then we discover that the bad guys have decamped from Antarctica and now live in an actual secret volcano lair on an island in the South Pacific. Seriously.

One of the characters (I think Orm) mentions that the base must have a lot of shielding to not show up on satellites. But the volcano has a massive plume of green smoke coming out of it…

Because they probably know what a mess this is, the script team have also thrown in a bunch of references to other movies. The scene where Arthur and Orm visit an undersea crime lord is clearly based on Jabba the Hutt and Mos Eisley Cantina. Arthur’s final big speech is a combination of T’Challa’s speech to the UN and Tony Stark’s “I am Iron Man” press conference. There are probably others too.

All of this is a little bit sad because lurking in the background of the film is a lot of good messaging about climate change and saving the planet. I suspect that good work was largely wasted.

There were no giant war crabs.