Aquaman (2018) – The emptiest of empty spectacles, Aquaman manages to cram every inch of the screen with eye-popping visuals while delivering the bare minimum of anything else you might want in a movie. There’s certainly fun to be had in watching giant CGI battles between armies of undersea warriors riding giant seahorses and whales, but it would be nice if the script had even a hint of originality or energy or reason to exist beyond making cash.
Ultra-sculpted hunk Jason Momoa stars as the titular hero, and he gives a decent enough performance, I guess. I couldn’t tell if the wry smirk on his face throughout was due to his realization of the crap he’s being asked to say, or simply because he managed to be killed off early enough in Game of Thrones that no one is mad at him for how the whole thing played out. Momoa and his pecs play Arthur, a man torn between his dive bar-hopping life on land with his human father, and his “destiny” to become King of Atlantis. We learn all about his history – and that of the whole underwater Atlantean society – in a series of painful exposition dump scenes at the start of the movie.
In fact, the whole endeavor gets off to a laughably lame start as we are “treated” to ten-plus minutes of the love affair between Aquaman’s father and the Queen of Atlantis, who happens to wash up on the rocks of the lighthouse he maintains. Nicole Kidman, for some reason, plays the Queen, and between her tragic plastic surgery choices and the CGI de-aging of her lover, the whole thing looks strangely fake and otherworldly. Before proceeding to the actual movie, though, we get two more clumsy backstory sequences that set up Aquaman’s antogonists, Black Manta (a bitter terrorist-for-hire who blames Aquaman for killing his dad) and King Orm (Aquaman’s half-brother and rival for the throne).
I guess they felt that they needed two villains because neither of them is particularly compelling. Black Manta seems ported in from a mediocre Arrow episode, while Patrick Wilson’s bloodless take on King Orm exudes all the menace of Jared Kushner at a yachting regatta. While Manta’s beef with Aquaman is simply boring, King Orm’s villainy has a decidedly ambiguous feel to it. Basically, he’s angry that humans keep dumping their trash into the sea, polluting his people’s homes with nuclear waste, oil, and plastic. He’s got a decent point, and it’s telling that the filmmakers felt the need to double down on his villainy by making him a racist, too. King Orm spouts off anti-human rhetoric and casts aspersions on Aquaman’s “half-breed” status constantly, the better to make you forget that Aquaman is basically fighting for humanity’s right to throw crap in the ocean.
The movie moves along briskly enough, hitting every familiar beat of the “reluctant hero” story we’ve been getting variations on since Star Wars. Amber Heard has a particularly tough role as Mera, a Princess of Atlantis who recognizes King Orm’s evil and joins forces with Aquaman. Why is it so tough? Well, you try delivering lines like this without laughing: “You are the bridge between land and sea. I can see that now. The question is, can you?” Or what about “Atlantis has always had a king. They need something more. They need a hero.” Sheesh.
The flick ends with a huge battle of CGI fish-folk, as you would expect. The whole movie has a been-there, done-that quality to it, largely due to the fact that literally every plot point has been lifted from another movie. If you can’t predict every big story beat the moment it’s set up, you’re really not trying. I don’t know what it says about your film or your cast when Dolph Lundgren turns in the most convincing performance, but it’s probably not good. Also, Willem Defoe in a skin-tight, full-body fish-scale wetsuit is not what anyone needs to see. Meh.
Other flicks I’ve seen recently:
Requiescant (aka Kill and Pray, Let Them Rest, Kill and Say Your Prayers) (1967) – This engaging spaghetti western opens with a brutal act of betrayal, as a group of indigenous people gather at a fort to sign a peace treaty with the U.S. soldiers stationed there. Led by their bloodthirsty, racist commander, the troops take a gatling gun to the whole assembly, murdering everyone but one boy who manages to escape. He’s adopted by a religious family who find him in the desert, and grows into a devout would-be preacher. When his adoptive sister runs off and becomes a prostitute, he sets off to save her from her chosen fate. He accidentally discovers that he’s an insane deadeye with his six-shooter, and takes up the Latin moniker Requiescant. He then gets (very) sidetracked by a feud with local land baron George Ferguson – the same racist who ordered the murder of his village! Needless to say, Requiescant gets his revenge on Ferguson by way of a murderous rampage that somewhat belies his background as a gentle preacher’s son. Mark Damon is particularly good as the aristocratic confederate kingpin, sneering his way through the film and generally reveling in his depravity.
Django, Prepare a Coffin (aka Viva Django, Django Sees Red, Nobody Returns…And Now Prepare Your Grave!, Get a Coffin Ready) (1968) – This time, it’s Terence Hill taking up the black hat of Django, and I can’t say I was overly impressed. Hill has always struck me as a bit lightweight for serious spaghetti westerns – his obvious amusement at what’s going on works better in his comic takes on the genre. Here, he plays Django as a hangman who’s secretly helping the unjustly accused escape from execution and sending them off to form a private army of vengeance. You see, Django’s wife was murdered by gunmen hired by a local politician, and Django’s out to even the score. The “surprise” finale will not be shocking to anyone who saw the original Django, and brings a hasty conclusion to a quite forgettable flick.
Hercules (1983) – Yipes. I caught this ridiculous flick because it was being featured on my favorite podcast, the bad movie forum How Did This Get Made? How, indeed. Lou Ferrigno, the 1970s TV version of the Incredible Hulk, plays Hercules in a story that bears almost no relationship to any Hercules story ever told. It’s really just a low-budget rip-off of Conan the Barbarian, with a dubbed Ferrigno flitting from one lame adventure to the next as he tries to rescue Cassiopeia from the clutches of the evil King Minos. The bargain-basement special effects are awfully lame – why is Hercules constantly fighting robots and mechanical beasts? The most impressive thing about the flick is the way Sybil Danning’s blouse manages to just cover her nipples. Well, that and the fact that it somehow made enough money to merit a sequel, 1985’s imaginatively titled Adventures of Hercules. I won’t be catching that one.
I couldn’t resist commenting. Well written!