Aquaman Parent Guide

In Aquaman, Jason Momoa stars as Arthur Curry, the lovechild of a lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison) and the runaway Queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman). Unfortunately, the King of Atlantis is jealous and sends soldiers to retrieve the Queen. To protect her family, she returns home where the king has her executed for disloyalty. As Arthur grows up, he is trained by Vulko (Willem Dafoe), who comes from Atlantis to ensure that one day Arthur will be able to take the throne and protect the underwater kingdom. Arthur’s half-brother Prince Orm (Patrick Wilson) has other plans, and it is up to Arthur and his friend Mera (Amber Heard) to stop him from waging war on the surface world.

This film is essentially DC’s take on Black Panther with a Little Mermaid filter, bloated to fill nearly two and a half hours. Audiences could hope that a film with a budget of 200 million dollars would at least have interesting special effects or costume design, but it doesn’t. The special effects aren’t bad per se, just uninspired and chaotic. The production design is downright laughable, although I’m sure that starting from this kind of source material left the production team with little to work with outside of fins and scales. One of the primary villains, known as Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) has a suit of armor so silly that I nearly snorted root beer through my nose. That’s not a good sign.

Despite its many flaws, Aquaman is fortunately not too problematic in terms of negative content. Apart from standard superhero violence and one scene of drunkenness, the movie manages to avoid excessive profanity and sexual content. That being said, a lack of objectionable content does not indicate the presence of good film-making. Children and younger teens will by turned off by the slow pacing and overstretched run time. Older teens will find the goofy aesthetic and shoehorned romance uninteresting. Adults will be bored nearly to death by painful dialogue and awkward exposition. Really, this isn’t a winner for anyone.

Since this is another big superhero release, moviegoers probably know what to expect from Aquaman but are unlikely to have expectations that are low enough for the painful reality of this film. I can assure you that there are far better options within this genre. From a plot that is essentially one tedious fetch-quest after another, to the painfully awkward dialogue, and the bizarre production design, this movie isn’t going to net any new fans to the superhero universe. Aquaman stinks worse than anything that could come from the dead fish on the screen.