'Aquaman 2' Mostly Sucks, But James Wan Seems Like He's Having Fun

'Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom' is yet more sign that the expanded universe is finished as a cultural force. And now James Wan is free to do something else. Hooray!

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“Everyone is good at something. Me? I talk to fish.”

This is the first line of Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom, delivered by star Jason Momoa via voiceover as he rides a giant iridescent seahorse on his way to pound a few pirates attempting to take over a container ship in the middle of a rainy sea. It’s sort of emblamatic of director James Wan’s entire approach to the material: This is really stupid, why not have some fun with it?

Wan’s first Aquaman, released in 2018, stood out as a goofy, absurdist beacon in what was then an otherwise hopelessly over-earnest and continuity-driven genre, back when the Marvel Cinematic Universe was still the undisputed cultural juggernaut every other studio was forced to mimic. The last few years have seen Marvel’s money machine sputter and die, a victim of the narrative bloat that naturally goes along with trying to reconcile 33 different films and however many TV serieses into a single fictional universe. And now, at last, it seems people have really, truly, finally gotten sick of this shit. If anything represents a triumph of the human spirit, it’s that.

Fast-forward to 2023 and it still feels like James Wan is the only one having fun, yet not even the guy who gave us Furious 7 (the best Fast movie, do not dispute me) and Malignant can enjoy himself quite enough to transcend the entire format. Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom is good for the occasional laugh, but it can’t reverse the decay in an obviously dying genre.

If Aquaman 2 were just a movie about Jason Momoa traversing the seas on fantastical sea creatures and bashing up pirates, with an occasional interlude to drink Guiness with his dad, it’d probably be pretty good. Momoa isn’t the world’s greatest actor and still has a tendency to rush through his lines in extended mumbles on occasion, but he’s still the best in the world at being Jason Momoa. And a lot of times a movie needs Jason Momoa more than it needs a great actor.

But… you know… gotta have a whole universe in these things, and that requires a Big Bad with an evil plan and whole backstory and blah blah blah, and the next thing you know you’re knee deep in alternate universes.

Okay, so Aquaman 2 doesn’t exactly have a multi-verse, but after part one introduced us to the previously-hidden undersea world of Atlantis (of which Aquaman is now king), we now find that there is an entire other, evil version of Atlantis also hidden underwater. But, like, under icecaps and volcanos and shit. Bizarro Atlantis? Sure, why not.

Randall Park, playing a wise-cracking scientist, goes looking for Atlantis under the north sea ice cap one day, only to find a big scary octopus thingy that kills his friend instead. Then this guy the Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen) shows up, along with his whole militia, to “help” Randall Park further explore this undersea world. (The scary octopus one, anyway, which I guess is different from the undersea world where Aquaman is… you know what? Not important). This Black Manta guy, who is very serious, wants to kill Aquaman, because Aquaman killed Black Manta’s father in the last movie (don’t really remember that part, mostly I remember a giant octopus who played drums). And I guess exploring under this ice cap helps Black Manta further that goal somehow? Unclear! Not a lot of coherent motivations in this movie, to be honest.

Anyway, Black Manta discovers a magical trident that immediately possesses him like the ring in Lord of the Rings, giving him a psychological connection to an ancient evil king who promises to give Manta Aquaman-killing powers. Soon, Manta has a whole fleet of ancient evil boats powered by orichalcum, an energy source infinitely more powerful and damaging to the environment than even fossil fuels. Manta (with the help of poor Randall Park) has to steal the orichalcum from the Atlanteans, who stopped using it long ago, but keep it in ancient vaults for some reason. Soon Manta is trying to terra form the entire planet with a massive orichalcum furnace that he keeps burning 24/7. Which, again, furthers his goal of killing Aquaman somehow.

Aquaman has to stop this guy, and in order to do that best, he concludes that he should go free his brother, Orm (Orm!), played by Patrick Wilson, who is being held in a desert prison guarded by vampire creatures (where he was put after Aquaman vanquished him in the previous movie). This leads to a whole scene of Aquaman infiltrating the vampire prison in the desert with his superintelligent octopus sidekick, kicking the asses of various giant scorpion horses and vampire ghouls along the way. It’s hard not to respect how few black-clad commandos there are in Aquaman 2. James Wan simply refuses to do something that easy; he is to CGI bad guy monsters what Homer was with the star wipe.

So then Orm (Orm!) and Aquaman are all teamed up, and it makes their parents, played by Nicole Kidman and Dolph Lundgren, very happy. Nicole Kidman’s face doesn’t really move at all anymore and Dolph Lundgren speaks every line of dialogue as if he’s in the middle of a deadlift, and I can’t tell whether it’s a physical condition or a dramatic choice. Anyway, Amber Heard is around sometimes too, playing Aquaman’s wife, Mera (presumably short for “a mera-maid who-a live-a under-a the sea!”), though seemingly stripped of most of her lines after the fact to avoid reminding people of all the tabloid stuff. In any case, it’s hard to figure what purpose any of these characters really serve to the story. I guess you occasionally need someone around to say things like “That’s crazy, Aquaman! Your plan is too bold!”

So it seems that Black Manta controls an orecchiette mine (I’m never going to remember orichalcum, I’m sorry) on an island in the South Pacific. Only all the orecchiette he’s burning in his giant furnace is mutating all the flora and fauna! So when Aquaman and Orm (Orm!) get there to stop Black Manta’s evil plans, they first have to fight off all manner of giant bugs, rats, and man-eating flowers, Godzilla-style.

Aquaman 2 isn’t much for coherence, but boy does it have a lot of stuff. It might be one of the most stuff-filled movies I’ve ever seen, breezing effortlessly from desert vampires and giant scorpions to evil submarines and giant fauna, ultimately culminating in an ungodly orgy of Atlantean sea beasts doing barely comprehensible battle with an entire army of zombie demon people — these last being the civilization of Necris, led by the ancient evil king who gave Black Manta the vision, and once the rival of the king of Atlantis, before his greed and orecchiette-burning turned his entire civilization into ghouls who were encased in the ice caps until Mantis thawed them out again. Hopefully Aquaman and Orm (Orm!) can vanquish them back to a different realm whence they can stay until required by a plot device in a future movie.

It’s exhausting just recounting it all, and you can’t help but be a little impressed with the sheer volume of inventiveness, even if it mostly kind of looks like half-assed CGI wingdings crammed together most of the time. Even when it’s mostly bad, there’s a vibe to it missing from a lot of other movies like this. It’s ludicrous but never lazy; Wan is a maximalist for maximalism’s sake, and the glee he seems to take in all this is occasionally contagious in spite of the material. It’s just a shame that he has to try to cram in all these kingdoms.

It’s the old portal problem. Once you’ve already had a superhero save the world, pretty soon he has to save the universe, then the space-time continuum, then the fabric of reality and matter itself... If you never kill off any characters, they have to keep existing somewhere. And so you inevitably end up with a kind of Mormon afterlife superhero universe where everyone just sort of gets their own planet. And where’s the drama in that?

Do we need this much continuity in movies? It is hostile to basic reason. No one cares! Just start the story over again wherever you feel like it!

Wan does what he has to do, but eventually the story all comes down to a pro wrestling-esque fist fight, albeit with magical tridents and lots of CGI window-dressing. I think Jason Momoa might’ve yelled “Nobody messes with my woman!” at one point, or something to that effect. I don’t really remember, the memory began to degrade basically the second it was formed. Probably for the best.

“I think that was my favorite DC movie,” my 10-year-old stepson said on the way out. (I assume it was recency bias).

“Yeah, it was pretty funny, huh?”

“Yeah.”

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