Aquaman Review

Wan understood something none of his predecessors did, which is that a man who talks to fish is never going to be cool and the only way through is to lean all the way in. So the film gives us glowing seahorse cavalry, a crab kingdom, a trench of albino horrors that briefly turns into a genuine horror film, and Julie Andrews voicing a monster the size of a stadium. The Sicily rooftop chase is superbly staged, all long unbroken camera moves handing off between two sets of characters.

Jason Momoa is charming rather than good, and the film mostly needs charming. The writing is the problem and it is constant. Nearly every line is either a plot instruction or a callback, characters explain the rules of Atlantis to each other in the middle of fights, and Patrick Wilson's Orm is given a motivation about surface pollution that the film raises and drops. Amber Heard's Mera is a satellite navigation system with red hair. It is loud, ugly in places and never boring.