And so ends the ‘DCEU’, the 10 year experiment from DC to catch up with Marvel’s world-conquering success – never particularly cohesive nor well-loved by the public – with the wettest whimper possible. James Wan’s Aquaman sequel The Lost Kingdom is less a triumphant goodbye than a white flag of surrender, the dying breaths of a shared universe finally giving up the ghost. It’s an exercise for all involved, including the audience, in pure franchise obligation, a film so boring it even seems bored with itself as it ticks off all the expected superhero movie moments with no panache or energy whatsoever. A dull story in its own right, now confirmed to be leading up to nothing at all and, based on the box office projections, already dismissed as a financial failure, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom never once justifies its own existence.
Picking up a few years after the end of the original, we’re reintroduced to Arthur Curry/Aquaman (Jason Momoa), now entirely shod of any Justice League responsibilities, as a bored and reluctant king of Atlantis, trying to balance his high-stakes job with raising his infant son alongside his wife and queen Mera (Amber Heard). It’s a balance made all the more impossible by the re-emergence of the first film’s secondary baddie Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who still bears the same murderous grudge against Aquaman but is now empowered by an ancient and evil talking trident (voiced by Pilou Asbaek).
This central rivalry, reheated from the original but rendered even less interesting by Manta’s possession by the trident, is so powerfully boring that the film around it never even stands a chance of being fun or interesting. There’s some stuff that should be fun between Aquaman and his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), who Arthur needs to break out of prison to help in the fight against Manta, but the writing here from David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick is so engulfed by the worst kind of generic superhero quippiness that no actual *characters* can emerge.
Momoa looks like a spent force in the lead, while the supporting cast struggle to bring any feeling beyond ‘contractual obligation’, though Wilson does escape with some dignity intact. Behind the camera, Wan seems just as uninspired. I can’t say I particularly liked the aesthetic of the original, but there was a sense of grandiosity and spectacle there that is almost entirely absent here. Everything just looks horrible, whether it’s the ugly and weightless CG environments or the moments of location shooting that look more like a Jason Momoa travel show than a big budget movie, while there isn’t a single memorable action set-piece, though I might be haunted for a while by a scene involving an absolutely repulsive CGI baby.
Fundamentally, the worst thing a film in this genre – for which the quality bar isn’t actually set all that high – can be is boring, and that is precisely what Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is. It runs at two hours, which isn’t hugely long in superhero movie terms, but feels utterly interminable. 2023 has been a tough year for superheroes, from bad box office results to ever more impatient fans and critics, so it feels fitting that it should close out on such a soporific stinker. The genre won’t end here – hell, even DC isn’t actually ending here, with the ‘Elseworlds’ story of Joker 2 coming next year and James Gunn’s full universe reboot with Superman Legacy in 2025 – but if Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom shows us nothing else, it’s all the evidence we need that we all, studios and audiences alike, deserve a long, long break.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 