Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom Review

You can date the rewrites from the screen. Characters vanish between scenes, a whole relationship is compressed into a montage, and the film swerves into an odd extended riff about Patrick Wilson's Orm eating a cockroach because that pairing tested better than the plot did. Wan still stages one or two lovely things, a lost kingdom rendered as bioluminescent ruin, and a burning orange trench sequence that briefly recalls his horror career.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is the casualty. Black Manta ended the previous film with the best revenge motivation in the whole run, a son avenging his father, and here he is possessed by an ancient trident and reduced to a glowing eyed instrument, which throws that story away. Jason Momoa is playing broader and enjoying it less. The climate change framing is stated in dialogue and never dramatised. It exists mostly to close a book that had already been closed by a management change, and it plays exactly like something made by people who knew that.