Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) Review
2/10
Official trailer
Black Manta finds a black trident, becomes possessed by an ancient king, and begins mining an element that accelerates global warming. Arthur Curry breaks his imprisoned brother out of a cell to help him stop it.
The 2 is for a film that’s given up. The first Aquaman was garish, enormous and entirely committed to its own absurdity, and this one is the same absurdity performed by people who know nobody is coming.
I find this film more depressing than bad, and it’s plenty bad. Everybody on screen seems to know the lights are about to go off, and the whole picture goes through the motions of a sequel with nothing riding on it. It’s loud, grey and weightless, and the only parts I’d willingly sit through again are the ones where Momoa and Wilson bicker.
What it has is the Momoa and Wilson double act, which is funny and belongs to a smaller film, and about ninety minutes of digital ocean in which none of it matters.
Released After the Cancellation
By the time this arrived in December 2023, the studio had publicly announced that the entire continuity was being rebuilt, that a new creative leadership was in place, and that these characters wouldn’t continue. That’s an unusual condition for a film and it shows in everything around it. The marketing had nothing to promise, the cast had nothing to say in interviews, and the audience had no reason to attend beyond curiosity. It’s also unfair to the picture in one way. Every set-up in it is for a future that had already been canceled before release. That means the film is performing continuity for a continuity that doesn’t exist.
The reshoots are visible too. Reported cameos were removed, characters were changed, and the finished picture has the look of something repeatedly revised to match a plan that kept changing underneath it. Two years elapsed between the end of principal photography and release, across multiple reshoot periods and at least one delay. After that much adjustment a committee is negotiating the film, and I can feel the committee in every scene.
A work whose value depends on a future can have that future removed while it’s being made. Everything on this page shows the same thing and this is the most extreme version. Write so that the current book is the point and the next one is a bonus.
Repeated revision to match changing external requirements produces an unevenness readers can feel. The work stops having a single intention and becomes a record of several abandoned ones. If a project’s context changes completely during production, the options are to restructure or to finish the original version deliberately. Continuing to patch is the one that produces this.
The Brothers Are the Film
Arthur is loud, uninterested in ceremony and prone to insulting people. Orm is formal, humorless, has been in a cell for years, and disapproves of everything. Momoa and Patrick Wilson are very good together and the film knows it, giving them a long stretch in the middle where they travel, argue, eat things Orm finds disgusting and are gradually less hostile.
The cockroach sequence is the best thing in the picture. Orm eats one on a dock, having been told it’s a delicacy, and Arthur lets him, and both of them play the scene entirely straight.
I laughed at that scene, and I resent the film slightly for it, because it proves how much better everything around it could have been.
That’s a completely different film and a considerably better one. Two brothers who dislike each other, on a road, with a shared problem and nothing else in common, is a structure that works without any of the surrounding apparatus. Wilson also does the harder half. Orm has spent years imprisoned by the man now asking for help, has a legitimate grievance about it, and is playing somebody who would rather be anywhere else and can’t afford to be.
The Villain Has No Position
David Kane wants revenge because Arthur let his father die in the first film. That’s a real grievance and the best thing the earlier picture had.
This film removes it. An ancient king possesses Kane partway through. That means his decisions are no longer his, and a character with a legitimate personal claim becomes a vessel. That’s the single worst structural choice available with this material.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is a good actor with nothing to play as a result. The performance is largely delivered through a mask, in a voice that’s partly somebody else, pursuing an objective that belongs to a five thousand year old king. The plan is also climate change, delivered as a literal plot. Melting the ice caps releases a hidden kingdom, and the film raises a real subject and uses it as a mechanism. That’s the same failure Dominion had with the locusts.
The closing address to the United Nations makes it worse. Arthur appears before an assembly and asks for cooperation on the environment. That’s the film converting its own plot device back into the real issue and requesting credit for both.
The United Nations speech is where the film lost the last of my patience. A movie that used melting ice caps as a plot lever turning around to lecture me about the environment is cheap, and I’d have cut the whole scene without blinking.
Never take a personal grievance away from an antagonist. A character with a specific reason to hate the protagonist is worth more than any amount of ancient power. Possession, mind control and corruption all do the same damage. They remove the person and leave a function.
A real-world issue used as a plot mechanism will read as opportunism. Either the subject is what your story is about or it shouldn’t be in it. The test is whether your villain would still want this if the supernatural element were removed. If not, you’ve replaced a character with a device.
It Looks Like a Game
Almost every frame is digital. The oceans, the kingdoms, the creatures, the vehicles and a considerable amount of the characters’ surroundings are rendered, and the lighting is uniform across all of it. The first film had the same approach and got away with it by being deliberately excessive. Octopuses playing drums, sharks with saddles, a color palette borrowed from an aquarium shop, and a director enjoying himself. This one is greyer, darker and more serious. That removes the only defense the approach had. A rendered world that’s also drab has nothing to offer the eye at any point.
I’d take the drumming octopus back in a heartbeat. The first film looked ridiculous and knew it, and that was half the fun. This one looks like a screensaver somebody left running in an empty office.
The creature design is the exception. A giant insect used as a mount, the Brine kingdom, and a sequence in a jungle with a drilling operation are all better than the film around them.
James Wan is also a considerably better director than this suggests, and the evidence is in the horror sequences. A submerged research station with something moving in it is tense for about four minutes, because Wan knows exactly how to stage that and gets almost no opportunity.
The End of Something
It took around four hundred and thirty-four million dollars against a budget reported near two hundred. That’s another loss in a category that had been producing them for several years.
That figure also looks respectable and isn’t. A film costing two hundred million needs roughly twice that to break even once marketing and exhibition are counted. That puts this close to the line and well short of a success. What it really marks is the end of a ten-year experiment. A studio attempted to build a connected universe rapidly, in response to a competitor, without the individual films that make such a thing possible, and this is the last one. The whole enterprise is worth studying for that reason. The competitor spent eleven films across five years establishing characters before assembling them, and this studio assembled them in the second film and spent a decade trying to retrofit the foundation. Order matters and can’t be recovered afterward. Momoa is reportedly continuing in a different role under the new arrangement. That’s its own small comment on how much any of this was ever about the character. The other detail is Amber Heard, whose role was reduced amid a great deal of public argument that had nothing to do with the film. The result is a character who was a co-lead in the first picture appearing here in what amounts to an extended cameo.
You can’t assemble before you establish. A crossover works because readers already care about each participant, and gathering them first produces recognition without investment. This applies to any series with multiple protagonists and it’s the most expensive lesson available on the subject. Responding to a competitor’s success by copying its endpoint instead of its method is the standard error. The method was eleven separate works, each of which had to succeed alone.
When a project is the last of something, write it as a conclusion. This one performs setup for a future it knew was gone.
Should you watch Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom?
No, unless you want the cockroach scene. It’s a 2 because two actors found a funny little movie inside this one and the studio buried it under a canceled continuity, a villain whose grievance gets possessed out of him, and a melting-ice-cap plot the film then wants applause for. It’s obscene that this much money went into something so joyless, and Momoa and Wilson deserved a much smaller and better picture.
