Aquaman Picoreview: Someone said it was your average Marvel Phase One introductory superhero movie. I don’t think it was as good as any of the Phase One films, which were all tight in terms of storyline, but it was better than I expected. Granted, my expectations were very low, but still: better than I expected.
The special effects were good, Amber Heard’s wig was absolute rubbish (why. why. why. do you spend $160 million on a film and use a wig that looks you got it at a Halloween fright shop discount????), and Jason Momoa spent a great deal of the film wet and half naked and also occasionally got to act (I’m frustrated by the parts he’s cast in post-Game of Thrones, because I know from his Stargate: Atlantis days that he’s really a quite good actor, and he rarely gets to show it). There were some *very* bad lines, most of which were, for some baffling reason, featured in the trailers. It’s like they wanted to show you how badly a bad line could be delivered, even by a good actor. And honestly, I don’t know why the lines were so bad at all. The “redheads, eh” line should just have been cut, but the “what can be more powerful than a king” or whatever it is was just…I mean, you can rewrite that line REALLY EASILY to make it not suck, and they didn’t. o.O
It could have been 20 or 30 minutes shorter by 1. spending a little less time glorifying in their very, very pretty set designs & special effects, and 2. cutting a storyline & character that they absolutely could not cut without being pilloried by fanboys. Even so, I could have written that storyline to be shorter and still made the rest of it work.
There was a *lot* of satisfying fan service. I’m not even particularly an Aquaman fan, but have absorbed enough of it over the years to have recognized a lot of it clearly enough to go yay! every time something I knew showed up, and Ted, who *is* an Aquaman fan, recognized far more of it than I did and was really happy with the movie.
Temuera Morrison is terrific as Arthur’s father, and after they put a crown/helment on Dolph Lungrun’s distractingly bad hair he looked HOLY CRAP DEAR GOD WHAT THE HELL DUDE FANTASTIC.
I’ll probably see it again in the theatre, maybe even in 3D, because I bet the Atlantis scenes and other underwater vistas are pretty amazing in 3D.
Oh! And also, you only need to stay through the mid-credits. There’s no post-credit stinger. :)