About halfway through Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, I realized reviewing this movie would be a chore. Not because the movie is bad (it is) or because it was complicated (it isn’t). It simply dawned on me that I wasn’t retaining a single goddamn thing about it. Gibberish fantasy words dissipated in my temporal lobe. “Profound” character moments fell lifeless and limp onto the floor of the IMAX theatre, failing the jump from screen to my heart. The closest thing to arousal was the constant invocation by characters about an ancient substance called orichalcum, emphasis constantly on the C-U-M. Nothing mattered. Nothing stuck.
This doesn’t put it far off from the first Aquaman except for the fact that Lost Kingdom also has all the hallmarks of this late stage in the superhero era of cinema culture — shittier special effects, horrifically spliced reshoots and a story no one seemed all that committed to telling. James Wan returned to the director’s chair, a decision that shackled him to the prolapsed production for almost three years and constant reshoots. It will always be a mystery what story inspired him to take the job in the first place because it’s pretty clear any artistic intention at the outset was diluted and destroyed by the finished product.
The movie picks up a couple years after the first film. Arthur Curry aka Aquaman (Jason Momoa) is now the king of Atlantis and extremely bad at his job. He still lives on the surface with his dad, Tom (Temuera Morrison), and his son, lil’ baby Arthur Jr. Arthur’s wife, Mera (Amber Heard), hangs out with them sometimes depending on whether they could cut around the actress in the editing room. Arthur likes to spend his days drinking Guinness with his dad and avoiding work; whenever he’s forced to swim down to Atlantis, it’s clear he has zero aptitude for leadership. Trouble starts brewing when his nemesis, Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), becomes empowered by the long lost Black Trident and sets out to ruin our hero’s life. Aquaman is forced to rescue his previously villainous brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson), to take down their now mutual foe.
Most of the beats are just traditional sequel stuff. The former villain is redeemed; the classic villain is given a power up; the hero reverts a little bit to struggle with responsibilities he won in the first film.
Lost Kingdom’s main problem is that none of these characters were ones anyone left the first movie particularly attached to, and nothing they do here gives them further dimension or weight. Wan once again spends a vast amount of creative effort building his undersea kingdoms (of which there are still a half-dozen for some convoluted reason), but all the visual-effects and concept artists in the world are meaningless when the humans grounding the story are this bland and unremarkable.
Reshoots are a major part of a film’s production cycle and the explosion of their use in franchise films — as well as the reporting on such reshoots — has made the practice noteworthy to the audience at large when it was previously just part and parcel. Marvel has usually merged its extra footage with new material fairly seamlessly (in some films better than in others). Warner Brothers and DC have always had more trouble with theirs — take a gander at Ben Affleck in the Joss Whedon cut of Justice League, for instance — but Lost Kingdom takes the cake. Entire sequences are clearly shot in front of very, very poor green-screen; a decent amount of the dialogue has clearly been added in later, over wide shots of characters whose mouths you can’t see; and even Arthur Jr. is recast halfway through the film with a child who looks nothing like the one we meet at the start of the film. That last one is truly the most bizarre to me.
Frankly, even referring to Lost Kingdom as “finished” is generous. Someone once said a book is never finished, only abandoned. That rather adequately describes this one, except instead of putting it in the Safe Haven box, Warner Brothers should’ve just tossed it in the ocean.