Yesterday, after a long day, I plonked myself in front of the TV and spent 30 minutes trying to decide what to watch. My Watchlist is nearly as long as Michelle Obama’s schlong and yet there was nothing on there I was in the mood to watch. We’ve all been there, right?
I just wanted something that wasn’t going to require too much thinking. A show or a movie that I could just point my eyes at, turn my brain down to about 50% capacity, and go with the flow. Scroll, scroll, scroll… stop. There it was… Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom. Perfect.
This film is the final nail in the underserved Snyderverse coffin so I’m intrigued to see how it all ends. Jason Momoa being Jason Momoa (again). Amber Heard and Nicole Kidman in skin-tight wetsuits. And the visuals of the first movie, for all its faults, were great. This was the kind of monotonous popcorn nonsense I needed.
Instant Regret
The film starts with Aquaman narrating what he’s been up to since the first film. Basically, he finds the whole superhero / King of Atlantas thing mundane. Arthur would rather stay at home with his son, and his Dad and sink several cans of Guinness every night after doing the laundry.
In between snippets of Aquaman being Aquadad, there are flashbacks to some adventures and fights. And of course, they are set to some out-of-place rock song. I’m 20 minutes in and this movie wreaks of James Gunn’s influence.
Long gone are the days of Superheroes being someone to aspire to. That God-like being with powers beyond human understanding, that we would all give one, if not both of our bollocks to be like. Or that vigilante who is hell-bent on righting wrongs and bringing justice to this unjust and cruel world.
No, it’s all gone. Being a stay-at-home Dad is the life that we should all want, not saving the world, punishing bad guys, and rescuing the beautiful damsel in distress.
The people in charge of these beloved characters have reduced them down to nothing more than man-babies who bumble their way through one adventure after another.
AI Made This
I am aghast at what I am seeing. Aquaman 2 is nothing more than two hours of 5-10-minute action scenes created for the Tik-Tok generation. Nothing is making sense and my brain is hurting.
It looks like this was written, directed, and edited by AI. That is the only way to describe this film.
I can honestly imagine James Wan sitting there in his mansion, loading up Chat GPT and instructing it to write a movie starring Aquaman that preaches about global warming. This makes the ham-fisted message about nuclear weapons in Superman IV look positively fucking Shakespearian.
After he has his script approved and given a shit load of cash to throw at this propaganda monstrosity, he hires several dozen AI specialists from some call center in India and gives each of them one page each from this script. He then tells them to type the keywords into an AI image generator and that he’ll be back in a few weeks to see how they’ve got on.
Upon his return, he then sorts through the clips and saves his favourites onto his hard drive. Once done, he then uploads the clips to an AI editor and tells it to splice them all together to make a two-hour movie.
He sends the finished piece to James Gunn, who injects his signature “quirky” humour into several scenes and bosh – job done. Release it to the plebs and when it fails, we’ll blame the Synderverse.
Tik-Tok-Tastic
To sum up this movie and spare you going through what I just witnessed, this is how this pans out. Like I said, just a collection of 5-10-minute scenes cobbled together with all the love and care that you would expect from a hamster who decides to eat her young rather than endure another day of eating oats or whatever the fuck those things eat.
One minute we’re on land with Aquaman, his Dad, and his kid and Momoa is doing doughnuts on the sand with his motorbike.
Then we’re in Atlantas and there are loads of fish people talking about technology, global warming, or something. Then we’re in the desert with an octopus rescuing Night Owl. There’s fighting and one-liners and nobody is taking this seriously.
Now we’re with Black Manta on Captain Nemo’s submarine and he has a girl army. He also seems to be possessed by the King Of The Dead from The Lord Of the Rings.
We’re in a jungle with Orm and Aquaman and there are giant butterflies and man-eating plants. Also, giant insects are eating a giant dead rat who then gives chase to Arthur and Orm and they escape.
We have a flashback to Aqua King Of The Dead and some ancient technology that is speeding up global warming, or is it global boiling?
Now Ivan Drago is here with Nicole Kidman and Amber Heard and they are rescuing Arthur’s Dad who has been injured by Black Manta.
Drago is wearing a wet suit and walking like he’s just taken a shit in it. Or perhaps that was Amber up to her old tricks again and he’s just going with it in fear of being dragged through the courts.
Now we’re in Atlantas again but in Aqua Dead King’s forgotten kingdom and it’s all kicking off. There’s a giant crab man making one-liners amid battle even though the ice wall is melting above them and sending the world into a climate catastrophe.
Orm now seems to be possessed by Aqua Dead King who makes Arthur bleed with undoes some spell that frees the real Aqua Dead King from his prison because of ancient bloodlines or something. Aquaman fights the Dead King who he defeats with barely an inconvenience.
Catastrophe over. The Atlantians make themselves aware to the world and everyone is in shock even though they have known about Aquaman since 2017’s Justice League.
Aquaman takes to the podium with the world watching and reassures the world that being a child of land and sea he will bridge the gap between both worlds.
He says something more about climate change and then he grabs the mic, lets rip with a woohoo or something, does a mic drop, and literally fucks off out of shot. The end.
That is literally how the Snyderverse ends – WOW! James Gunn oversaw this and that’s a big as a fuck you Zack Snyder and everything he tried building as I have ever seen.
Capeshit Is Dead. Long Live Capeshit.
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom is just another in a growing list of absolute abominations that are so far removed from early DC and Marvel films that they aren’t even the same genre anymore.
Christopher Noaln’s Dark Knight trilogy treated the legacy and history of these characters and their creators with respect. And say what you like about Snyder and his trilogy but he wanted to achieve the same aesthetic. Marvel did the same at the beginning with Iron Man, Captain America, and the Avengers films but that’s all now a distant memory.
I believe the starting point for this downfall was James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy. I enjoy GOTG, it’s solid and certainly changed things up. However, because it was so well received, every comic book movie since has tried to copy its recipe.
Taika Waititi came along and dialled it up to 11 with Thor Ragnorak and it’s been downhill ever since.
The #Metoo movement added insult to injury and the M-She-U was born. What the MCU and the DCEU/DCU or whatever you call it, is now simply the deformed and retarded child of its predecessors that needs euthanizing.
Finally, I have concluded that James Gunn and Taika Waititi are to the superhero movie genre what AIDS has been to the gay community. A fun time had by all until the too-late realisation that you overindulged and you are now in for an inevitable long slow death for there is no immediate cure.
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