Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom

Ocean’s Razor

Aquaman And
The Lost Kingdom
Directed by James Wan
USA/UK/Canada/Australia/Iceland
2023 Warner Bros
UK Cinema Print

Okay, so I was kinda putting off seeing this one but I’ve finally got around to looking at Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom and, it plays much as the first one with me. I'd originally put off seeing the first film because the depiction of Aquaman looked closer to the modern day comics version of the character (although not really... I’ll pick up on that later) and it turned out to be a very entertaining, pulpy adventure movie. Bad word of mouth had put me off seeing this second one for a bit (the film was released over a week ago) but. once again, it turns out that the better a modern superhero movie is, the less the audience seems to like it. This year has been full of decent superhero movies (with the one dud being The Flash but, even that had some nice things about it, reviewed here) but none of them have really been making the kind of box office they should have been making. Heck, a few of them even ended up on my year’s best list and, while Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom doesn’t quite make the grade as far as that’s concerned, it’s a pretty fun romp of an entertainment.

Granted, there are a few jokes which might be looked on as in fairly bad taste, especially to someone of my generation but, ultimately a combination of fine performances from Jason Momoa as the title character and Wan regular Patrick Wilson as former villain Orm, now sprung from jail and forced to team up with his brother to save the world from the threat of Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), coupled with a story which is a good fit for the inevitable action sequences (although it gets kinda confusing by the end of the picture) gives this movie a good old fashioned theatrical serial kinda feel and, indeed, one of the director’s admitted influences was the 1980s Flash Gordon movie,which is itself informed from the original 1930s comic strip and the movie serial versions.

There is one other influence which I spotted as ‘a thing’ but didn’t honestly expect it to be anything more than a coincidence, until I looked up the IMDB trivia and found that the director is citing it as such. That’s the black, military style uniforms and helmets worn by Manta’s underwater army, which are very reminiscent of the costumes worn by the main protagonists of Mario Bava’s Planet Of The Vampires (itself an influential film, of course, to a certain other late 1970s movie which I’ll not delve into again here).

So, it’s a fast moving action piece and both Amber Heard and Nicole Kidman are back as Aquaman’s wife and mother, respectively. Now, after all the fuss in real life Hollywoodland with Amber Heard, I was expecting the film makers to jettison her character quickly into the running time and, indeed, there’s certainly an early sequence which keeps her hospitalised for a good deal of the movie... but she’s back in the heat of the action by the end of the film and I’m glad to say she’s not just treated as a throwaway character here. Dolph Lundgren and Temuera Morrison also do good stuff with their returning characters in this and so the film has a really good feel to it (although Willem Dafoe’s character seems to have died between movies, it has to be said).

And although this version of Aquaman is trying to be the modern iteration of the hero, I’m delighted to say that this is in appearance only. The ideas and creations of the world rendered in this underwater universe are pretty much clever and witty (for the most part), H2O fuelled versions of their ‘surface dweller’ counterparts, rather than giving us something totally alien in its nature... so, yeah, it’s really not a million miles from the golden and silver age stories of Aquaman from many decades ago that I used to read, for sure.

Rupert Gregson-Williams’ score to the movie is also pretty good, reminding me a lot of Lorne Balfe’s outstanding score for Black Adam at times but, alas, there is no proper CD release of this at time of writing. C’mon people, get this score out on the only format worth publishing it on!

Okay, so a short review but bottom line is that I had another, surprisingly, good time with Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom and... there is a mid-end credits scene which is a nice punchline to a gag earlier in the movie. But with that, this is also a heads up reminder that, due to the stupidity of those in charge of the DC movies at present, this will be the last of the DC Cinematic Universe films in this iteration... instead, all those beautifully connecting linking devices from various end credits have been jettisoned, along with the great actors involved, while a famous director has an experimental tinker and reboots everything. Probably the silliest thing you could do at the moment and, if there really is any rivalry between comic book companies DC and Marvel, one wonders if the person in question is really working covertly for Marvel because, with this braniac move, Marvel have ‘won’ for sure. It’s a shame the DCCU didn’t have the stamina of their nearest competitors but, there you go, these things happen I guess.