The DCEU has finally come to an end. The never-ending Crisis of bad timing, bad management, and just generally bad decisions on the part of Warner Bros. is about to be laid to rest and reborn as (hopefully) something better. Not that it’s been all bad, though. Hell, I’d argue that it wasn’t even mostly bad; Wonder Woman, Suicide Squad (both of them), the Snyder Cut, and, where today’s subject is most pertinent, Aquaman all still hold up as worthy adaptations of the DC pantheon of heroes. I still have my issues with the franchise’s lesser moments (all the turning-around I’ve done on Zack Snyder still hasn’t made Man Of Steel look any friggin’ better), and the tail-end has led to some truly inexplicable releases like Black Adam and the Skittles movie, but as someone who still holds a torch for capeshit, I want these movies to be good. Which is why this last hurrah is especially disappointing.
Arthur Curry is in the exact same spot he was in the last film, trying to push through his immaturity and insecurity to be the king that Atlantis needs. Only we don’t even have the thematic textures of Arthurian lore to bulk up his character arc here as, aside from now being a dad, there’s not a whole lot of growth on his part. Jason Momoa, bless him, is still doing his best with the role, but he’s not working with the best material here.
It doesn’t help that, despite Patrick Wilson returning as Ocean Master and now teaming-up with our hero, the dynamic between them feels really off. Orm serves as the straight man here, which is a decent fit for Wilson’s acting chops, but because Arthur himself is in this weird flux between being the better man he was at the end of the first film, and still being the drunken sailor, his place in the story feels like a missed opportunity. Not the only one here, sadly.
The further along this film went, the more I regretted comparing James Wan’s approach to the world-building and action scenes in the first film to that of Peter Jackson with the Lord Of The Rings movies. Not that that comparison wasn’t apropos, or even that his sense of scale is diminished here (he and DP Don Burgess still manage to make the world both above and under the sea feel massive), but because he apparently took that kind of praise to heart and started borrowing more directly from those films and others.
The titular Lost Kingdom, with its orichalcum-green tinge, is a dead-ringer for Minas Morgul, while a brief diversion into an underwater pirate haven is just a wetter version of Jabba The Hutt’s lair from Return Of The Jedi, with Martin Short voicing the Hutt-alike Kingfish. To say nothing of what it takes from Marvel, between the reheated Thor/Loki dynamic with Aquaman and Ocean Master (which gets directly namedropped at one point), and the ending which manages to rip off both Iron Man and Black Panther at the same time.
What makes the noticeable lack of fresh ideas sting even more is how what this film does have going for it, with its depiction of ancient civilisations capable of such environmental destruction that they mirror what humans are doing in the present, are cut to ribbons. Whether it’s the reshoots or Kirk Morri’s editing specifically that’s to blame, the film keeps trying to present a sprawling world for the characters to explore and contemplate the larger implications of, but never gives the audience any time to really take it all in. The aforementioned pirate haven is little more than a brief detour, backstories are delivered with such slapshod narration that it genuinely looks like a last-minute decision, and even the more fun locales like the jungle infested with mutated insects and plants… honestly, they’re about as immersive as any given locale shown in Josstice League. Ouch.
While I missed the chance to review Wonder Woman 1984 (and still haven't seen it yet), I can take a pretty decent guess as to why that film received the lukewarm-at-best reception that it got: Geoff Johns does not know how to write Wonder Woman. But here, I can’t even point directly at a specific source for the issues here because it feels like nothing came together into a cohesive whole. This production has been through the wars, with everyone from Warner Bros. to Elon Musk digging their hands into this at various points, and it absolutely shows through in the final product. I’m tempted to call this James Wan’s weakest film to date, as at least Dead Silence and Insidious: Chapter 2 felt like encapsulated experiences with a real motive behind them, underwhelming as they were. In a way, something that still maintains this level of desire to explore a larger world, and to an extent does, could serve as bragging rights if this is Wan at his worst, but that still doesn’t make this film worth recommending.
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