Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is kind of an homage to Thor the Dark World but with bad acting.

Happy Civil Rights Day. I normally don't post on a Monday, but I've got a lot of backlog on the things I want to talk about as a result of taking November and December off. So, today I'm giving you my thoughts on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which I saw in theaters the week it was out. When I saw the first Aquaman movie I thought I'd been treated to a visual spectacle that I'd only seen twice before. The most recent one was the Thor movie...so this was basically Thor but underwater. And then the other movie that matched the Aquaman vibe was one called Flash Gordon which was a Dino De Laurentiis production (if I remember correctly) starring the late Max Von Sydow as Emperor Ming. I think that's the first time I was really enamored with an actor's voice. His only contemporary at the time was James Earl Jones, and luckily today with Jones being (for the most part) retired, the "great voice" is present in another actor named Benjamin Cumberbatch. I could listen to his voice all day long, and the voice acting he did as Smaug was the highlight of the entire trilogy of Hobbit movies.

So let's just get the "thumbs up" and the "thumbs down" critique out of the way: did I like the movie? Yes. But it's a bad movie. And I mean that in a particular way that some bad movies are really good. For example, Big Trouble in Little China is a bad movie. But it wholeheartedly embraces its "B" movie status and you just roll with it, and it ends up being a lot of fun. It also has tons of memorable quotes from both Kurt Russell and Victor Wong (the guy who plays Egg Shen). In Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom you've got characters being chased by huge roaches and avoiding human-eating plants, you've got lots of huge water shots, and a mythical "Lost Kingdom" of Atlantis that's about to melt out of the ice it was sealed in, bringing doom to everyone else.

Basically, what I'm saying is that if you don't expect this movie to be a masterpiece, you'll more than likely enjoy it. It's a straightforward and unpretentious action movie. Momoa, Amber Heard (yes, she's in it though they hid her in the trailers due to the Depp controversies), and Nicole Kidman all turn in bad acting performances. The part where Momoa's son gets kidnapped and all three of the above are screaming in emotional pain is completely over-the-top and painful to watch, and Kidman in particular is not helped by the fact that her face simply doesn't move anymore (she's had way too much plastic surgery and now kinda has this look to her that reminds me of the characters in The Polar Express). The plot could be accused of being a retread of Thor: The Dark World. But given that this is the last movie in the DCEU (and the sunset of Momoa as Aquaman) it seems like the screenwriters probably saved money by doing that. It's basically "heroic brother breaks evil brother from prison to fight an ancient evil trying to return." In one scene, Aquaman even points at his brother Orm and refers to him as "Loki." So, they know exactly what they're doing.

I'm not sure why the DCEU never caught on, but I have my theories. The first is maybe Zack Snyder. The way he makes movies doesn't really appeal to wide audiences in the same way as Marvel does, and Man of Steel honestly didn't feel like it was designed to kick off a DC movie universe. I actually didn't really like Man of Steel when I first saw it, because it was such a dark interpretation of Superman. But a lot of people actually did like it, and that's kind of the foundation upon which the DCEU was built. In the years since, Man of Steel has grown on me quite a bit, and I appreciate the action scenes between the terrifying invading Kryptonians who are legit scary (which is probably why I didn't like the movie: the villain was too frightening for me). In all likelihood, I bet Man of Steel was supposed to be a Batman Begins type reimagining that got shoehorned into a shared universe because Avengers earned a billion and a half dollars. And then there was a tragedy in Snyder's life, causing Warner to reach out to Joss Whedon, who filmed a remarkably different version of Justice League than the one Snyder wanted. Then the studio abandoned the shared universe model with loosely connected standalones with Batman and Joker movies that had nothing to do with the DCEU. And then the stuff with Ezra Miller happened in the news, and The Flash was made during all of that and none of it worked at all.

Some people suggest that there's superhero fatigue. I don't think that's what is happening to the box office. Rather, it's bad movie fatigue. Marvel is stuck trying to replicate lightning in a bottle with their Avengers movies. But the reason that kind of thing never works is because actors age, time goes on, and you pick and choose among the best plots that are commercially available and go with those. Like, Tom Holland is now (I think) way too old to be playing Spiderman. It's just a fact. The multiverse opens up tons of options to make smaller stories starring infinite versions of these characters, so the movie industry should just use this option when crafting stories. All that being said, James Gunn (who has been put in charge of the DC reboot) might be able to pull it off starting from scratch. I would like to get at least one good Justice League team up or two before its all over. Honestly, the thing that Marvel pulled off by giving us four Avengers movies was pretty darn incredible. It would be awesome if the DC characters could perform the same and give us a huge finish with four Justice League movies, defeating Darkseid in the last two. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

On Wednesday, I'll be talking about the Apple+ series called Invasion. And on Friday, I want to talk about Reacher, which is the number one series on Amazon (it's super great).