Aquaman

The Neon Depths of Earnestness

Making Aquaman look cool was always going to be a fool’s errand. The character spent decades as the butt of superhero jokes, a guy who talks to fish and seemed permanently one step away from a seahorse entrance. James Wan’s answer in *Aquaman* is smart because he doesn’t really chase cool. He goes for excess. The movie is loud, damp, garish, and proud of it. Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry arrives not as a mythic nobleman but as a bruising outsider who drinks beer and throws his weight around. Coming off the fearsome physical presence of Khal Drogo in *Game of Thrones*, Momoa brings a heavy, slouched confidence that suits a hero who has never quite fit on land or undersea.



Wan seems almost giddy with the size of the sandbox. You can feel the horror director in him stretching out. The ocean becomes less a realistic environment than a fantasy cosmos, crammed with creatures, glowing kingdoms, and pulp-adventure nonsense. The influences are obvious in a good way: Ray Harryhausen monster energy, a little Jules Verne, plenty of comic-book neon. Structurally the movie is messy, sometimes very messy, but it never feels dead. It has this hyperactive, sugar-rush pulse that keeps dragging you along.



The sequence that sells the whole thing is the Trench attack. Arthur and Mera sail into the storm, the sea starts to boil, and suddenly thousands of creatures are swarming the boat. Wan shoots it like a nightmare breaking into a Saturday-matinee adventure. The flare Arthur lights turns the darkness blood-red, and when the two of them dive beneath the surface, the camera pulls back to show them dropping into blackness surrounded by a cyclone of red eyes. It’s pure horror grammar dropped into a superhero movie, and it rules. Wan uses the ocean’s scale to make the heroes feel tiny and vulnerable.



The script, though, can’t match the visual imagination. Characters keep stopping to explain what we just saw, and Patrick Wilson, as Orm, has to shout his way through a pile of Atlantean politics and surface-world ecology while wearing a giant chrome helmet. It’s goofy. The movie is bloated. The complaints are fair. But I can’t hold a total grudge against a blockbuster this committed to sincerity. In a franchise landscape full of self-aware snickering, *Aquaman* just barrels ahead and believes in its own nonsense. It misses often, but the conviction is half the charm.