Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

No one would ever want to be in the position that director James Wan has been put in with the sequel to his billion-dollar grossing superhero epic Aquaman. Coming off the heels of fellow DC titles The Flash, Shazam! Fury of the Gods and Blue Beetle, all of which have either tanked or underperformed at the box office, Wan sees the long-delayed Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom opening at quite possibly the worst time to release a superhero film. Audiences are undeniably at the end of their leash with the current glut of superhero films, with even Marvel experiencing the drought face first, pushing their entire 2024 theatrical slate to 2025 — with the execption of Deadpool 3 — after the overwhelming rejection of films like The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. While outliers such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse proved you can still lure in audiences with a strong enough story and creative vision, the days of every Marvel or DC film ruling with an iron fist is clearly over. Add in the other real-life headaches, that of the seemingly never-ending regime changes over at Warner Bros , causing numerous release date shifts, a number of extensive reshoots and the news that James Gunn will be entirely rebooting the DCEU with his inaugural Superman: Legacy film set to kick off in the summer of 2025, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom seems to be released at the worst possible moment. And for a franchise like DC, having undergone countless leadership changes, plenty of studio interference — hence the Snyder Cut, and an overall lack of cohesion, it should seem only fitting the DCEU would go out on a sloppy, unfocused note; not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Arthur Curry/Aquaman (Jason Momoa) has now started a family with Mera (Amber Heard), welcoming Arthur Jr. into their lives. Having to now balance being a family man and the ruler of Atlantis, Arthur finds this lifestyle isn’t all its cracked up to be. However, David Kane/Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), in his quest for revenge for the events of the first film, comes in possession of a mysterious black trident that grants him powers connecting to the ancient evil king Kordax (Pilou Asbaek) and his lost kingdom of Necrus. With Manta set out on destroying the economical balance of the planet in his path of revenge, Arthur is forced to rescue his imprisoned half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), the former ruler of Atlantis, to help defeat Manta and his arsenal.

For what is clearly a stripped-to-the-bone, reshuffled, re-edited narrative, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom makes the most egregious sin for a tentpole superhero blockbuster: it’s a real slog. Trading in the charm and humor of the first film that blended maximalist absurdism with visual grandeur, the sequel now takes up cheaper, often brazenly ADR-ed quips that land with a thud and characters that have very little in terms of arcs, with the exception of “rescue baby”, “defeat Black Manta”, “stop global warming”. You can feel the endless studio notes all over. From including shoehorned family hijinks — we get maybe 5 minute in before Arthur gets peed on by his newborn son, to an insufferable amount of time spent with the film’s comic relief Dr. Shin (Randall Park). There are characters who feel sidelined in scenes in which they are prominently featured — specifically Amber Heard’s Mera, and characters who are all but stripped of their depth and complexity to serve the plot, namely Black Manta. For one sectrion of the film, its a buddy action comedy, for another chunk it’s a Ray Harryhausen-style adventure. There’s even far too brief flashes of fantasy horror stemming from Mario Bava and Peter Jackson found in here.

While Wan’s first Aquaman may have had a bloated runtime, it was never dull, with its high-spirited story, campy tone and thrilling visuals. Lost Kingdom is a shorter film at 124 minutes, but feels far longer. For every adequately constructed set piece — albeit with much murkier visuals than is usual for a Wan film — there an extended sequence of exposition centered around a substance called orichalcum — get ready to hear that word more times than you would ever hope to. Even the encounters with the exotic underwater locales and sea creatures lack the gonzo imagination of the first. Martin Short voices a sea creature gangster in a scene that should be far more interesting than it is. Orm’s arc and the budding relationship between him and Arthur is one of the few entertaining threads this film has, with Wilson getting to expand on his performance in the first film. Most of the fun doesn’t come to fruition until the final act where Wan is finally allowed to turn up the panache, with a massive underwater battle that offers glimmers of the visual vibrancy of the first film. Wan’s fluid, hyperactive camera work tries to inject a shot of energy in the arm of his film, but it’s in service of easily his weakest set pieces.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is a hodgepodge of tones and conflicting plot threads that never coalesces into a successful whole. Undoubtedly caught up in the crosshairs of corporate mandates and studio politics, the James Wan-directed conclusion to the DCEU is one unfortunate mess.