--Written as a Facebook rant allowed to be posted as a review by Guest Reviewer Jason Booth
So check it my people.
My wife and I snuck away to a movie theater and decided for some unfathomable reason to see Aquaman, and these are all the reasons that it was one of the dumbest movies I have ever seen.
First of all, let me just say that we considered a lot of other movies. Vice and Mary Poppins Returns and The Favourite and a couple of other solid choices streamed across our conversational reasoning earlier that afternoon.
Aquaman. 64% on RottenTomatoes. NPR says it's very dumb, but apparently that Game of Thrones' swashbuckler Jason Momoa has a lot of fun in the lead role or something. Sounds like a fun way to relax for a couple of hours, eh fellow new parent? Thor: Ragnarok was fun, right? We enjoyed that one, yes? The Little Mermaid as a live action movie where Ariel just kicks a lot more ass? Eh? Ehhh???
And so, after the hip new restaurant with the Mezcal Cocktails featuring an overwhelmingly confident use of the color mauve in the color scheme, we find ourselves firmly planted in the middle of the XD theater in our carefully pre-selected seats. The theater is only a fifth full, although the bag of sour candy that we've brought with us is bursting at the seams. All these years later and, while the security has improved somewhat, I could still sneak a fucking Shetland Pony into most major American movie houses and those teenage employees wouldn't even cock an under-tweezed brow.
The movie starts out with a skosh of promise. Khal Drogo is fighting some underwater submarine pirates, or, something like that. He doesn't know he's Water Boy yet... or like, he does, but he's pissed at underwater people because they killed his CGI mom, Nicole Kidman, who looks like she's 22 because I dunno. Who cares? It's an action flick! Anyway, it's not the worst thing ever yet. But then very quickly, Water Boy is brought back down to the surface because the water people have decided to wage war on the topsiders (that's us), and they do this by throwing all of our boats back onto our shores and beaches.
TSUNAMI ATTACK! Or... INTENSE LITTERING AND POLLUTION!
But STUPID! JOKES ON YOU SEA PEOPLE! Do they have any idea how many ships we'd lost in the ocean and you just gave it all back to us? Thanks for all the lost treasure you idiots.
Anyway, that was an aside. The movie just keeps getting worse. There is a giant Tron showdown where AquaFellow battles his younger pureblood brother and, don't worry, there is DEFINITELY a humongous Octopus drummer that plays at the battle because it's like a sporting event. You know, like in Ragnarok, but way less interesting and with no Jeff Goldblum to make things quirky-fun. Okay, so, underwater sea people can swim at the speed of fifteen Phelps, and yet, for some reason, they drive around in sea cars and ride on giant sharks and seahorses who literally can't swim faster than they can. There is this one scene where Wet Dude and his new sea princess girlfriend (Amber Heard), Discount Black Widow, are about to crash into a crater of underwater lava as they're escaping the Lost City, and, at the last second, they eject from their sea car (because duh, it's the LX and the LX totally comes with underwater ejection feature, thanks Subaru), and then, just as the car crashes into the lava, they just swim away. Because, oh yeah, they were able to swim this entire time and like, way faster than the car they were just in. This happens over and over again in this film. There are constant ledges and lava pits and things people can fall into, even though, as they show us time and time again, they can all just, ya know, swim away and stuff.
Patrick Wilson is the bad fish guy, which is weird because I thought he was Nite Owl, and Willem Dafoe is also there, and he's like, a secret mentor/good fish guy, but that's also strange because I thought he was the Green Goblin. So basically this is the movie where heroes from slightly better movies trade sides--which I believe is also a perfect example of just how complicated Maritime Law actually can be. Amber Heard is a crappy, red-headed ninja princess. Dolph Lundgren is in the movie and he just looks so tired. It doesn't matter how many Just For Men Red Beard Dye boxes they use on him--he is withering away under that ocean and I really think he should just go back into retirement now. Most of the movie is spent meeting relatively shitty looking Mer-people and various underwater creatures, as if George Lucas was just left alone for a summer to make the fourth prequel that he was never allowed to make, and then they just stole all the characters from some even shittier Gungan island colony that we never asked him to envision.
In the end, do you know why Aquaman wins? Well, it isn't JUST that marvelous hair that flows through the water like a never-ending L'Oreal commercial. You see, he goes on a quest to find a magical Trident--the most powerful trident because it was forged by, I dunno, someone important. Once again, we're talking discount Thor and 99 Cents Store Mjolnir here. Most of the storytelling felt lazier than my inability to look up how to insert an umlaut over that previous spelling of 'Mjolnir'.
Oceanic Hombre eventually finds his Disney spear and now Ursula Nite Owl better watch out! Big random war at the end between the bad mer-people and the good mer-people to decide if they'll go to war with the surface people and in the meantime, all these people on the surface are just standing around like, "What the hell happened to all of our boats? What is going on exactly?" Because no one ever went back to tell them that there was an underwater rager that would eventually decide the fate of humanity going down.
Whatevs.
The Goodfish Golden Triton Boy beats evil Hard Candy Nite Owl Patrick Wilson on a big surface just out of the water (because he's weaker there or something). Oh also, there was a scene earlier in the film where they met Good Green Goblin to talk and he gave them a treasure chest and they all spoke in an air bubble because some mer-people wouldn't be able to visit a space like that without special suits--OH SHIT HERE ARE SOME ATLANTIC NAVY SEALS WITH SPECIAL SUITS!
That type of stuff fills a good amount of the movie. Water physics that don't quite work. Mer-people and regular people that seem to basically be able to go everywhere. Don't worry what your lungs do--there is a suit to fit your needs, I promise.
But don't worry, Water Dude still talks to whales with his forehead. That still happens.
CGI Nicole Kidman gets to go back to her New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Captain of a lighthouse keeper husband, who never gave up hope that his supernatural underwater wife would return to the broken home she left behind to visit her alcoholic, wharf-dive-bar of a child. And now Khal Drogo finally has his own khalasar, all these years later. Awwwwwwquaman.
Sea Minus
My wife and I snuck away to a movie theater and decided for some unfathomable reason to see Aquaman, and these are all the reasons that it was one of the dumbest movies I have ever seen.
First of all, let me just say that we considered a lot of other movies. Vice and Mary Poppins Returns and The Favourite and a couple of other solid choices streamed across our conversational reasoning earlier that afternoon.
Aquaman. 64% on RottenTomatoes. NPR says it's very dumb, but apparently that Game of Thrones' swashbuckler Jason Momoa has a lot of fun in the lead role or something. Sounds like a fun way to relax for a couple of hours, eh fellow new parent? Thor: Ragnarok was fun, right? We enjoyed that one, yes? The Little Mermaid as a live action movie where Ariel just kicks a lot more ass? Eh? Ehhh???
And so, after the hip new restaurant with the Mezcal Cocktails featuring an overwhelmingly confident use of the color mauve in the color scheme, we find ourselves firmly planted in the middle of the XD theater in our carefully pre-selected seats. The theater is only a fifth full, although the bag of sour candy that we've brought with us is bursting at the seams. All these years later and, while the security has improved somewhat, I could still sneak a fucking Shetland Pony into most major American movie houses and those teenage employees wouldn't even cock an under-tweezed brow.
The movie starts out with a skosh of promise. Khal Drogo is fighting some underwater submarine pirates, or, something like that. He doesn't know he's Water Boy yet... or like, he does, but he's pissed at underwater people because they killed his CGI mom, Nicole Kidman, who looks like she's 22 because I dunno. Who cares? It's an action flick! Anyway, it's not the worst thing ever yet. But then very quickly, Water Boy is brought back down to the surface because the water people have decided to wage war on the topsiders (that's us), and they do this by throwing all of our boats back onto our shores and beaches.
TSUNAMI ATTACK! Or... INTENSE LITTERING AND POLLUTION!
But STUPID! JOKES ON YOU SEA PEOPLE! Do they have any idea how many ships we'd lost in the ocean and you just gave it all back to us? Thanks for all the lost treasure you idiots.
Anyway, that was an aside. The movie just keeps getting worse. There is a giant Tron showdown where AquaFellow battles his younger pureblood brother and, don't worry, there is DEFINITELY a humongous Octopus drummer that plays at the battle because it's like a sporting event. You know, like in Ragnarok, but way less interesting and with no Jeff Goldblum to make things quirky-fun. Okay, so, underwater sea people can swim at the speed of fifteen Phelps, and yet, for some reason, they drive around in sea cars and ride on giant sharks and seahorses who literally can't swim faster than they can. There is this one scene where Wet Dude and his new sea princess girlfriend (Amber Heard), Discount Black Widow, are about to crash into a crater of underwater lava as they're escaping the Lost City, and, at the last second, they eject from their sea car (because duh, it's the LX and the LX totally comes with underwater ejection feature, thanks Subaru), and then, just as the car crashes into the lava, they just swim away. Because, oh yeah, they were able to swim this entire time and like, way faster than the car they were just in. This happens over and over again in this film. There are constant ledges and lava pits and things people can fall into, even though, as they show us time and time again, they can all just, ya know, swim away and stuff.
Patrick Wilson is the bad fish guy, which is weird because I thought he was Nite Owl, and Willem Dafoe is also there, and he's like, a secret mentor/good fish guy, but that's also strange because I thought he was the Green Goblin. So basically this is the movie where heroes from slightly better movies trade sides--which I believe is also a perfect example of just how complicated Maritime Law actually can be. Amber Heard is a crappy, red-headed ninja princess. Dolph Lundgren is in the movie and he just looks so tired. It doesn't matter how many Just For Men Red Beard Dye boxes they use on him--he is withering away under that ocean and I really think he should just go back into retirement now. Most of the movie is spent meeting relatively shitty looking Mer-people and various underwater creatures, as if George Lucas was just left alone for a summer to make the fourth prequel that he was never allowed to make, and then they just stole all the characters from some even shittier Gungan island colony that we never asked him to envision.
In the end, do you know why Aquaman wins? Well, it isn't JUST that marvelous hair that flows through the water like a never-ending L'Oreal commercial. You see, he goes on a quest to find a magical Trident--the most powerful trident because it was forged by, I dunno, someone important. Once again, we're talking discount Thor and 99 Cents Store Mjolnir here. Most of the storytelling felt lazier than my inability to look up how to insert an umlaut over that previous spelling of 'Mjolnir'.
Oceanic Hombre eventually finds his Disney spear and now Ursula Nite Owl better watch out! Big random war at the end between the bad mer-people and the good mer-people to decide if they'll go to war with the surface people and in the meantime, all these people on the surface are just standing around like, "What the hell happened to all of our boats? What is going on exactly?" Because no one ever went back to tell them that there was an underwater rager that would eventually decide the fate of humanity going down.
Whatevs.
The Goodfish Golden Triton Boy beats evil Hard Candy Nite Owl Patrick Wilson on a big surface just out of the water (because he's weaker there or something). Oh also, there was a scene earlier in the film where they met Good Green Goblin to talk and he gave them a treasure chest and they all spoke in an air bubble because some mer-people wouldn't be able to visit a space like that without special suits--OH SHIT HERE ARE SOME ATLANTIC NAVY SEALS WITH SPECIAL SUITS!
That type of stuff fills a good amount of the movie. Water physics that don't quite work. Mer-people and regular people that seem to basically be able to go everywhere. Don't worry what your lungs do--there is a suit to fit your needs, I promise.
But don't worry, Water Dude still talks to whales with his forehead. That still happens.
CGI Nicole Kidman gets to go back to her New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Captain of a lighthouse keeper husband, who never gave up hope that his supernatural underwater wife would return to the broken home she left behind to visit her alcoholic, wharf-dive-bar of a child. And now Khal Drogo finally has his own khalasar, all these years later. Awwwwwwquaman.
Sea Minus
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