This is the way the Snyderverse ends: With a bang (The Flash) and a whimper (Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom).
The Aquaman sequel suffered a legendary run of bad luck. It’s quite awe-inspiring, really. WB/DC got a desperately-needed win with Aquaman in 2018, so soon after Justice League shit the bed. Everyone was raring to go and get a sequel into production toot-suite, but no, James Wan wanted to take a break and re-up his horror cinema bona fides with Malignant.
That other movie wrapped photography in December 2019. Just in time for EVERYTHING to hit the fan.
The COVID-19 pandemic. The nuclear legal war between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. The Warner Bros. restructuring under Discovery, its financial collapse, and its self-induced disintegration into an industry laughingstock. The world-conquering release of Avengers: Endgame and subsequent mainstream concern that superhero media had run its course. The WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes. The double-whammy of Shazam: Fury of the Gods and The Flash, compounding the Black Adam fiasco from the prior year.
Did I forget anything? Oh, yeah — Zack Snyder jumped ship to Netflix, while WBD announced that DC on film would be starting over from scratch with Peter Safran and James Gunn.
(Side note: Oh, and let’s not forget that Aquaman had the misfortune of trying to pull off the whole “build a thriving world full of political intrigue in which everyone’s debating about whether to trust or destroy the outside world” thing in the same year that Black Panther did pretty much the exact same thing and did it infinitely better. And then Black Panther: Wakanda Forever turned around and one-upped Aquaman/Atlantis a second time, but more directly and even harder!)
It’s frankly a miracle that this one wasn’t burned off like Batgirl was. (At a guess, the corporate suits didn’t want to burn any bridges with Jason Momoa or James Wan.) This movie was destined for failure, and even the most wildly improbable best case scenario guaranteed that we would never get a sequel.
Yet here I am standing up for it. I know, I was surprised too.
We pick up four years after the first movie. Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) is now married to Mera (Amber Heard) and they’re raising an infant son together at the lighthouse where Arthur’s dad (Tom Curry, played again by Temuera Morrison) still resides. Willem Dafoe’s character died offscreen, but Atlanna and Nereus (respectively played once again by Nicole Kidman and Dolph Lundgren) are helping to hold things down at Atlantis.
Arthur is still king of Atlantis, but he kinda sucks at the job. Aquaman has always been better and happier at beating up pirates and breaking shit, as opposed to navigating politics. It certainly doesn’t help that Arthur wants to mend bridges with the surface-dwellers and collaborate on solving worldwide problems on land and sea, but so many Atlanteans still hold on to their old fears and prejudices.
Speaking of which, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II returns as Black Manta. He’s spent the past few years looking for Atlantean tech to repair the suit that Aquaman destroyed in the previous film. What he gets is the discovery of a lost seventh kingdom of Atlantis, frozen in the polar ice caps after its king turned into overblown evil incarnate. Thanks to global warming, things have thawed enough for Manta to get his hands on the lost kingdom’s mythical black trident, with which he makes a Faustian bargain to destroy Arthur and everything he loves, tear down Atlantis, plunge the world into a climate apocalypse, and so on and so forth.
In light of this, the film finds a contrived excuse for Arthur to get his disgraced half-brother (Orm, played once again by Patrick Wilson) out of the prison he got stuck in after the first movie. Thus the two of them spend the second act in a kind of buddy comedy, bonding as they set out to stop Manta and his demonic patron. Hilarity ensues.
No getting around it, the script sucks. It’s loaded with hamfisted dialogue and repetitive exposition. In fact, I’m pretty darn sure that Randall Park — here playing a Black Manta lackey with a guilty conscience — was put into the film solely to provide ADR exposition and keep the film at two hours. Don’t even get me started on all the piss jokes.
I might add that the world-building is slapdash, the villain is pathetically thin, and there are gaping plot holes in the rush to compress so many different storylines into a reasonable runtime. In fact, with a few rare exceptions (namely Arthur, Orm, and debatably Tom), it feels like everyone in this picture is only playing a plot device instead of a character. But here’s the thing: The previous movie had all of the above same problems.
(Side note: Recall that Nereus is Mera’s father. Thus the infant Arthur Jr. is his grandson as well. This is never brought up at any point in the movie, and there’s not even the slightest hint in Lundgren’s performance to acknowledge this. In fact, it’s almost like the family connection between Nereus and Mera was forgotten entirely. Consider this an example of how so many characters in this film have been stripped down to what’s strictly necessary for plot momentum.)
Nobody liked Aquaman for the plot or the script, we liked the movie because it was fun. It had a sense of adventure and action. It had that boundless Jason Momoa charisma. All of which are absolutely in effect here. We’ve got Jason Momoa doing what he does best, we’ve got plenty of monsters and creatures both above and below the sea, and we’ve got plenty of awesome action sequences, including a kick-ass trident duel at the climax. I might add that in place of the lackluster Arthur/Mera romance of the first movie, we’ve got a far more comical and heartfelt interplay between Arthur and Orm to carry the second act.
Yes, the film can get preachy with its environmental themes and the villain’s big evil plan is straight out of goddamn Captain Planet. But this is Aquaman — ecological themes were always going to be part of the equation. I might add that the film puts a heavy emphasis on family and the connection between brothers, but Arthur is a land-dweller at heart while Orm carries a lifelong grudge against the surface. Thus the “brotherly love” theme is parlayed into a message of cooperation and inclusivity for the sake of coming together to solve the world’s problems.
Is it cloying and self-righteous? Sure, but nowhere near as much as Wonder Woman ’84. At least this movie dovetails its themes together in a thoughtful and inspiring way that doesn’t feel like hypocritical bullshit.
The best I can say for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is that it’s a better send-off than the DCEU deserved. It’s not a great movie, but hardly as bad as we all expected. It’s enough fun to serve well as a sequel, carrying on most of what worked in the first movie while regrettably carrying on most of the drawbacks as well. The film isn’t good enough to justify a third entry, but ends in such a way that no follow-up is necessarily warranted.
This is nothing more or less than a good place to end. Not bad enough to leave a bitter lasting taste in our mouths, but not good enough that we all lament at what might have been. We can all just shake hands with the Snyderverse, walk away on good terms, and have fun with these two Aquaman films as a standalone duology on their own merit. That’s all I ever wanted from a DC movie in this lame-duck period between regimes, and it’s the only DC movie (except maybe Blue Beetle) to clear that bar.