HOTJIST MOVIE REVIEW: AQUAMAN: JAMES WAN THE THIEF!
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This man essentially stole the Black Panther story and remixed it.
I already knew both premises were similar but hot damn, with the way the plot played out, Arthur Curry and T’Challa might as well have been separated at birth.
As y’all are won’t know, Black Panther and I will probably go down in the annals of critical history as enemies immortal. I had a myriad of issues with it but chief amongst them was the first act that languished in a Ulysses Klaue subplot that had no real bearing on its overarching premise. They say the first mavericks over the hill get hit by the arrows and methinks Wan took note and bent those arrows into a detour for a snappier, splashier, fun-filled film!
Soon as the movie opens, there’s some narrative housekeeping to bring us up to speed with the characters. Then the action kicks in and we’re firing on all cylinders. Virtually every scene is interspersed with remarkable set-piece after remarkable set-piece, against an Atlantis that is so SPECTACULAR, cirque du soleil ain’t got nothing on it. How in the world the VFX team didn’t merit any Oscar courtesy is still a wonder to me but, then the breaks and that’s not the only push back Aquaman has had to face.
When action pervades over character development, not only does it skew a film nearer the spectrum of unmemorableness, it also doesn’t sit well with critics who would readily rate Black Panther over Infinity War because the former, however heavy-handed, was profuse in its themes of isolationism than the latter which they jeered felt like a giant action sequence.
I don’t disagree Aquaman unravels like your regular superhero movie, pandering to the populace and playing to the pop-corn gallery. But I also don’t agree that its wanted for originality in any shape, form or fashion, detracts from the enjoyable viewing experience it provided. And I dug every second-per-minute of it.
It was 2018’s veritable ‘Jumanji,’ that luxuriated in its own self-serving mission to crowd-please and thus emerged a masterpiece of a bubble-gum out of it.
Other words, it was commercial to the hilt. Audiences take that for granted nowadays as ‘art’ is placed on this pedestal as a form of higher talent and intellect. But catering to the mainstream doesn’t come with a manual either.
When you’re that filmmaker in the cutting room, you are face to face with the dragon that is PACING. How to slay it? How do you tell a story while keeping the people entertained at the same time? Mutually exclusive as you might think those two things are, they aren’t. I could rave about ‘Moonlight’ to the moon and back but I watched it the third time and nodded off until that part Chiron barges into class and smashes his chair on the bully’s back! Now I’m woke! No pun intended.
Knowing when to slow things down and speed them up is ALL the difference. And THIS… This is what usually trips filmmakers up. Balancing story/character with action.
Some choose to ignore one and double down on the other. Others more ambitiously elect to juggle both to give their audience a transcendent experience beyond cinema.
Trouble is when they miss the mark, they have a hall full of people shifting in their seats and sighing from tedium.
Bumblebee and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse would trade their wings and tentacles for dorsal fins to take in half of the megabucks Aquaman is raking in at the Box Office. I had ‘Spider-Verse’ on my ‘most disappointing encounters’ list the other day and the lot of you called for my head on a pike like Ned Stark. But sometimes numbers don’t lie, and Spider-Verse, while not a flop, is middling in its performance. This isn’t to down the movie but to re-emphasize the incredible hurdle Aquaman crossed, however cheaply it seemed on the surface.
The acting doesn’t blow any fish out of the water but again, the baseline touchstone for a protagonist is likeability factor. To that end, Jason Momoa was endearing and Nicole Kidman could be my MOTHER any time. She was the nucleus and the heart by which all the characters revolved and as such, it wasn’t hard to pull or push for every one of them, including the villains King Orm and Black Manta.Only thing I found irksome, and I don’t know if James Wan was taking the piss or was downright tone deaf with it, were the romantic bits between Mera and Arthur. They were SO RIDICULOUS, our resounding hisses filled the theatre. Mera would try to climb a tree, she’d slip, to which Arthur would hurriedly catch her, they’d stare dreamily into each other’s eyes to hint that they were falling in love, and I’d be asking, “Is this Mills & Boon or ZeeWorld?” No, James Wan. That’s enough cheese you’ve had. Nehi!
Barring that, hand the man the keys to the kingdom. Just as important as taking risks is knowing when not to swing for the fences or jump the shark. Snyder sunk the whole DCEU franchise to the depths of the Marianas Trench with his experimentations; Wan may just have hauled the Titanic out of its wreckage
Tosin Falusi
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