Aqua­man and the Lost King­dom review – a super­hero sequel that sinks

That’s right: Aqua­man and the Lost King­dom. If ever a first draft hold­ing title ever made it right through all the lev­els of notes and amends and attempts to think of some­thing just a tiny bit mem­o­rable, it’s Aqua­man and the Lost King­dom. Giv­en that most peo­ple will like­ly refer to this film as Aqua­man 2, as it is the mod­er­ate­ly-delayed sequel to James Wan’s sur­prise 2018 hit, it’s not real­ly an issue. But it’s hand­i­ly evoca­tive of pret­ty much every cre­ative deci­sion in a film which address­es its audi­ence over and over and over again with the words: will this do? Per­haps we should answer the ques­tion: will it do?

The orig­i­nal was one of the few titles to ring box office tills and gar­ner polite (if hard­ly spec­tac­u­lar) crit­i­cal notices with­in the eter­nal fail­son block­buster fran­chise that is the DCU. Com­ing hot on the heels of Shaz­am! Fury of the Gods (tanked), The Flash (tanked) and Blue Bee­tle (tanked), it’s hard to know if this film is con­sid­ered just anoth­er piece of cor­po­rate can­non fod­der to be fragged by the expo­nen­tial­ly-more-mea­gre audi­ences who, at the height of sum­mer 2023, admin­is­tered an unequiv­o­cal broad­side towards the time-hon­oured super­hero movie by turn­ing out in droves for a glossy fem­i­nist para­ble and a three hour film about nuclear fission.

And so, the tim­ing of Aqua­man and the Lost King­dom could not be worse. One might spec­u­late that, in this moment (when even the large­ly more robust MCU is founder­ing), it would have need­ed to be an across-the-board 5‑star mas­ter­piece, 100 per­cent fresh, 90+ points on Meta­crit­ic to have even had a shot at suc­cess. Alas, what we have is a com­plete­ly fum­bled, cob­bled-togeth­er movie-esque col­lage of unwatch­ably fuzzy CGI in which ten thou­sand per­cent more effort has been put into mak­ing floaty under­wa­ter hair look authen­tic than it has to the script, sto­ry, char­ac­ters, dra­ma, attain­ing a sense of basic log­ic, mean­ing, etc… So no, it will not do. 

One of the prob­lems with this film is that Jason Momoa’s Arthur Cur­ry is no longer an under­dog, and the film does very lit­tle to make you want to root for his vic­to­ry. The jacked alpha quar­ter­back keg­ger-type schtick worked well enough in the first film, but to be frank, he comes off here as an annoy­ing jerk. And so dur­ing all the extend­ed com­bat scenes when he’s fight­ing cephalo­pod sub­marines or a pha­lanx of over­sized car­niv­o­rous crick­ets (?) you’re not real­ly both­ered as to whether he gets turned into bro bouil­l­abaisse or not. Patrick Wison returns in straight man detail as his ban­ished broth­er Orm, who has lit­tle more to do than project dis­gust at Arthur’s goof­ball prattling.

There’s a faint wisp of a sto­ry in there some­where, with the antag­o­nist of the first film (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Black Man­ta) return­ing for some afters, this time armed with a dark mag­ic tri­dent that he needs to take to the place to do the thing. But this is a(nother) prime exam­ple of block­buster film­mak­ing by rote, with ambi­tion lev­els deep in the neg­a­tive num­bers and the only pas­sion on screen com­ing from the prospect of get­ting to leave the green screen every day and hit the bar.

Inevitably, when words like this are pub­lished, the writ­ers are often tarred as sad-sack dweebs who don’t under­stand the lore and wouldn’t know a fun time if it swam up behind them and took a chunk out of their tor­so. But there are lit­tle pock­ets of cre­ativ­i­ty nes­tled in the film, in some of the design aspects and the ref­er­ences to camp mid-cen­tu­ry sci-fi in the pro­duc­tion design, but with­out con­text they’re all but mean­ing­less flot­sam on a sea of dig­i­tal murk. 

So no, this real­ly won’t do. If these are the cin­e­ma tent­poles of the 21^st cen­tu­ry, then at the very least they can hold up a colour­ful, well-made canopy in order to jus­ti­fy not only their exis­tence, but their promi­nence too. And if it turns out the super­hero movie has to be wheeled out for pal­lia­tive care (prove us wrong Hol­ly­wood!), then the sad thing is, peo­ple will unlike­ly remem­ber Aqua­man and the Lost King­dom long enough to sad­dle it with the blame.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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