AN OVERLONG THRILL RIDE! - 7/10

by Mohamad Khatib

 

Coming out of this movie, It felt like was I was in an almost 2 and a half hour virtual, extravagant, spectacle-like, theme park ride. I tell you now “Aquaman” will go on to make tons and tons and huge amounts of money, reaching 1 billion dollars and might even surpass that, and here comes the “but” word . . . .but it is forgettable.

 

   I can go on saying James Wan pulled off a full-on assault of his directorial chops, and skills, in addition to the mesmerizing cinematography and art and production design, creating a vast underwater world like no one has ever seen before, but Wan’s vision of this world and its explosive events suffered from over-convulsion of SFX, VFX, and CGI, even the Chroma-shot scenes of Queen Atlana and Arthur’s father were a tad much and noticeable. The exaggeration was not the only problem I had with this movie but also the over-dramatization of some of the regular above-water scenes like the one of Arthur’s childhood where he visits an underwater theme park. It’s like every scene had to be full of SFX and CGI and/or over-dramatisation, making the whole thing look like a 2 and half hour music video. You can clearly see James’ visual concepts in the first hour to an hour and thirty minutes into the movie making the one hour remaining just repetitive and dull. I can’t say the same about some of the above-water scenes such as Aquaman fighting Manta because they were tight and brutal, so where the rest of the hand-to-hand combat ones, I enjoyed them a lot.

 

   You can’t help but feel like Warner Bros. and DC took whatever they thought did not work in Man of Steel and Batman V Superman and not only did the opposite but also made more of it 100 times fold. Man of Steel and BVS were dark, so let’s just make everything brighter, those films were DE saturated, bring on whatever color exists in the world even create new ones, you thought Doomsday and Steppenwolf were big, not until you meet the sea creatures in this one, just make everything million times bigger and make the action set pieces more explosive. All these things in some moments in the movie just bored me. I take Batman V Superman, Man of Steel, and any Zack Snyder movie over this one anytime (maybe not Sucker Punch).

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