by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Cbarles the Blu-Ray
disc of the 2018 movie Aquaman, which turned out to be a spectacular movie visually — the five
“executive producers” (Jon Berg, Walter Hamada, Geoff Johns, and Zack and
Deborah Snyder) and the director they hired — James Wan, whose previous credits
include The Conjuring and Annabelle horror series and number seven in the Fast and
Furious series — enlisted
apparently half the CGI technicians in the world to create a series of stunning
effects, particularly the seahorses, sharks and aquatic lizards and the like
that inhabit the underwater world of Atlantis and provide the Atlanteans their
main means of transportation. Where it goes wrong is the plot; it not only
draws extensively from just about every “quest” legend in history (particularly
the tales of King Arthur — just to make sure we get the point, Aquaman’s
non-hero name is “Arthur Curry” — but also Jules Verne’s Journey to the
Center of the Earth, Raiders of the Lost
Ark, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu
Mythos, The Lord of the Rings (and a brief reference to Wagner’s Ring as well in the scene in which Aquaman’s weapon,
called a “trident” but really a quindent since it has five tines instead of
just three, is broken in two by the bad guy’s) and the Star Wars cycle — but it’s really (as I said of Raiders
of the Lost Ark when it was new) just a
Republic serial with a budget several orders of magnitude larger.
The film’s
committee-written script (Geoff Johns, James Wan and Will Beall, story; and
Beall and David Leslie Johnson-McCormick, script[1])
was structured, if you can call it that, like a Republic serial script, with
ponderous scenes of exposition there just to set up the next action highlight.
The Aquaman comic book debuted in
November 1941 as a part of a magazine called More Fun Comics, but he didn’t get his own stand-alone comic book
until the 1960’s, when he was just a guy in tight swim trunks and nothing else.
That wouldn’t have been so bad except that the parts of him you could see
looked like a mannequin, with virtually no musculature or physical definition.
At the height of my brief comic-book reading phase in the 1960’s (which had its
apex when my mom, my brother and I spent three months in the summer in the
fishing village of Ajijic, Mexico and I bought a lot of comic books because
they were just about the only reading material available in English), I
encountered Aquaman but thought he was just about the most boring character in
the DC stable and I was much more interested in Marvel’s equivalent, Prince
Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who like Aquaman came equipped with both lungs and
gills so he could breathe either water or air, but unlike Aquaman came equipped with long ears with
pointy tops (I’ve never seen this confirmed but I’ve long since been convinced
that Gene Roddenberry ripped off the appearance of Mr. Spock from Prince Namor)
as well as a compelling backstory in which he was the rightful ruler of
Atlantis with a long-time agenda of regaining his throne.
Well, starting in
2016 DC rebooted the Aquaman character to look more muscular and butch — he was
still topless but now his chest was ripped, and instead of just a swimsuit he
wore tight green pants with scales and fins to make him look more fish-like. It
was apparently this version that supplied the plot line for the 2018 film — to
the extent it has a plot line — in which
Aquaman (played as a three-year-old by Tainui and Tamor Kirkwood —the old dodge
around the rules of how long children can work by casting identical twins as
the same character — Kaan Guldur at nine, Otis Dhanji at 13, Kekoa Kekumano at
16 and Jason Momoa as an adult) is really Arthur Curry. He’s the product of a
love-match between his father Tom Curry (Temuera Morrison), a lighthouse keeper
on a New England shore, and his mother, Princess Alanna of Atlantis (Nicole
Kidman), who fled the undersea realm of Atlantis to escape an arranged
marriage. She lasted long enough on Earth to marry Tom and bear Arthur before
an Atlantean goon squad recaptured her and she agreed to go with them and marry
the asshole the Atlantean ruling family wanted her to so they wouldn’t kill
Tom. Got all that? While Tom was raising Arthur as a single parent, Arthur was
frequently getting visits from Vulko (Willem Dafoe), who trains him to fight
underwater and tap into his heritage as an Atlantean royal. Meanwhile, Atlantis
is being (mis)ruled by King Orm (Patrick Wilson), who’s determined to start an
all-out war on the surface world. In a bit of mildly pro-environmentalist
social commentary, he explains his determination to wipe out the surface-dwelling
population of Earth as being justified by the sheer amount of pollution we’re
dumping into the ocean and the way we’re threatening the existence of Atlantis
by underwater nuclear tests and other things we’re doing to fight our wars with
each other. So he uses Atlantis’s energy technology to cause a series of
tsunamis that washed up old warships and human garbage from the ocean floor.
Meanwhile, the now grown-up and Jason Momoa-played Aquaman makes his superhero
“bones” when he rescues the crew of a super-secret U.S. submarine from a
father-and-son team of Black pirates (Black as in African-descended, just to be
clear) pirates named Jesse (Michael Beach) and David (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II)
Kane. Though he’s unable to salvage the sub as a seaworthy vessel, he is able to make sure all the nice white crew members
get in their life rafts and he lets Jesse drown as the wrecked sub sinks.
David, of course, will never forgive Aquaman for letting his father die, and
ultimately he hooks up with King Orm to rat out Aquaman and his girlfriend,
red-haired Princess Mera (Amber Heard), for 30 pieces, not of silver but gold
(inflation strikes again!), and a black, armored diving suit that turns him
into a super-villain, Black Manta. Aquaman and Mera get a cylindrical recording
that supposedly contains a message left behind by King Atlan, founder of
Atlantis thousands of years before, and the two go on a chase across the world
— including the Sahara Desert and Sicily, where remnants of the Atlantean race
apparently ended up before dying out because they could no longer survive on
the surface — for a playback machine that will play the record. They plugged it
into one such device and it didn’t work — Charles joked at this point, “Sorry,
but you need to upgrade to System 7” — until Mera realizes that it needs to be
moistened, whereupon she manages to condense a bead of sweat from Aquaman’s
forehead (Aquaman, in one of his few good lines in the film, says, “Show-off! I
could have just peed on the thing!”). The record says, “Help me, Obi-Wan,
you’re my on-” — oops, wrong movie. The actual message is a flashback narrated
by King Atlan that makes this whole movie seem like a sequel to George Pal’s
1961 film Atlantis, the Lost Continent: the Atlanteans lived on the surface and had access to a limitless
energy source, but they ultimately got greedy and as a result their technology
backfired and sank their entire community into the ocean, forcing them to
evolve and learn to breathe water to survive.
The gimmick is that the good guys
have to reunite the seven kingdoms of the former Atlantis and find the original
golden trident King Atlan cast as his magic, invincible weapon — O.K., his
Excalibur or Nothung — that will enable Aquaman to defeat King Orm in
hand-to-hand combat, something he previously tried with the weapon his mother
left for him, which is referred to as a trident but is more accurately a
“quindent,” since it has five tines instead of three. Only in their first
battle Orm broke Aquaman’s weapon in half with the shaft of his own, so Vulko
called Aquaman back for more training. Meanwhile, the other kings of Atlantis —
at least the ones who are still ruling viable underwater kingdoms — including
Mera’s father, King Nereus (Dolph Lundgren), reluctantly go along with Orm’s proposed
war out of fear of what he’ll do to them if they don’t, sort of like Republican
Senators with Donald Trump. The big climax — at least the first one — takes
place in a realm of ice and water in which the long-thought-dead Queen Atlanna
(ya remember Queen Atlanna?), the part played by Nicole Kidman (ya remember Nicole Kidman?), turns out to be alive. To retrieve King Atlan’s
magic trident Aquaman has to defeat a giant eel-like monster called the
Karathen (whose voice is supplied by Julie Andrews, of all people — or is that another Julie Andrews? No, it is indeed she, our beloved
Eliza Doolittle on stage and Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp on film; I guess
in this film the seas are
alive with the sound of music), though instead of the duel-to-the-death we
expect Aquaman talks the Karathen into believing he’s the one true ruler of
Atlantis and the Karathen lets him take the trident, with which he returns to
Atlantis Central and overcomes King Orm in their duel — only Queen Atlanna
stops Aquaman from killing Orm on the understandable ground that she doesn’t
want one of her sons murdering the other. The film ends with everybody
reconciled and Aquaman and Mera getting together to rule Atlantis — only a
Marvelesque sequence in the middle of the credits roll lets us know that Black
Manta (ya remember Black Manta?) is still alive, still has his strength amplified by Atlantean
technology, and still wants to kill Aquaman (can you say sequel?).
So much of this story sounds familiar — not
only from old quest legends but more recent films from the comic-book universe
— that when I first heard of Aquaman and got a précis of what
the story was, I thought, “It’s like the writers decided, ‘Hey, let’s do Black
Panther with white people — and
let’s do it under water!’” The Black Panther parallels are pretty obvious — the rival claimants
to the throne, one from the outside world and the other (the villain) raised
indigenously; the quest to unite the seven kingdoms of a lost empire; the
limitless energy source and the political and moral dilemma of what to do with
it — but they only serve to illustrate the distinction between a work of power
and beauty and a piece of entertaining trash. Within the context of the
superhero genre, Black Panther dealt with serious social and moral issues — how
does a community handle a limitless energy source, and what are its moral
responsibilities? Does it stay aloof from the rest of the world, or does it
share what it has and thereby risk being corrupted, especially when they’re
part of an historically oppressed race and isolation was the only thing that
kept them from being colonized? But these themes, which were at the heart of Black
Panther director Ryan Coogler and
his co-writer, Joe Robert Cole, couldn’t have been of less interest to the makers of Aquaman. The big problem with Aquaman is the gulf between the physical imagination —
particularly the sea creatures the Atlanteans use as transport and beast of
burden (including one remarkable scene in which an Atlantean band’s drummer is
an octopus, playing a super-sized drum set with all eight limbs) and the lovely
use of color, including the contrasts between blue and red (there’s quite a lot
of red in the film since it’s established early on that Atlanteans have fire —
no, the filmmakers don’t ask us to believe anything can burn underwater, but
there sure seem to be a lot of underwater volcanoes in this film) — and the dramatic lack of imagination, the sense that we’ve seen (and
heard) all this before as well as the sense that this film’s “story” is as
pretextual as it was in the old Republic serials: just a lot of ponderous
exposition to set up the next action highlight.
