Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) Review

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 has 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.

What it has is the Momoa and Wilson double act, which is genuinely 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 would not continue.

That is 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 is also unfair to the picture in a specific way. Every set-up in it is for a future that had already been cancelled before release, which means the film is performing continuity for a continuity that does not exist.

The reshoots are visible too. Reported cameos were removed, characters were changed, and the finished picture has the texture 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. A film that spends that long being adjusted is no longer being improved, it is being negotiated.

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 is a delicacy, and Arthur lets him, and the scene is played entirely straight by both of them.

That is 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 cannot afford to be.

The Villain Has No Position

David Kane wants revenge because Arthur let his father die in the first film, which is a genuine grievance and the best thing the earlier picture had.

This film removes it. Kane is possessed by an ancient king partway through, which means his decisions are no longer his, and a character with a legitimate personal claim becomes a vessel. That is 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 is 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, which is 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, which is the film converting its own plot device back into the real issue and requesting credit for both.

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, which removes the only defense the approach had. A rendered world that is also drab has nothing to offer the eye at any point.

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 genuinely 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, which is another loss in a category that had been producing them for several years.

That figure also looks respectable and is not. A film costing two hundred million needs roughly twice that to break even once marketing and exhibition are counted, which 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 cannot be recovered afterward.

Momoa is reportedly continuing in a different role under the new arrangement, which is 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.

Should you watch Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom?

No, unless you want the cockroach scene. A film released after its own continuity was cancelled, with a villain whose grievance is removed by possession, a plan about melting ice caps, and two brothers in the middle of it who deserved a much smaller and better picture.

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