Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom: Abandonment Issues of the Warner Brothers Kind

After failing to defeat Aquaman the first time, Black Manta wields the power of the mythic Black Trident to unleash an ancient and malevolent force. Hoping to end his reign of terror, Aquaman forges an unlikely alliance with his brother, Orm, the former king of Atlantis. Setting aside their differences, they join forces to protect their kingdom and save the world from irreversible destruction.

REVIEW:

Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom tries to invert the sibling animosity of the first film into buddy brothers. That means Orm (Patrick Wilson) the half brother must play nice with the new Aquaman, Arthur (Jason Momoa) to prevent ecological disaster happening to Atlantis and the surface world. Arthur had stripped Orm of his crown, stole Orm’s fiancée (Amber Heard), beat him and embarrassed him in front of the entire nation and imprisoned him to a vampire cult that drinks his blood just enough to keep him barely alive. A bitter sibling rivalry is upended to make a comedic slap dash adventure film.

The attempts to lighten up Orm barely works. He’s gone from a bland villain to straight man and second fiddle hero to Arthur. Momoa quirky and off kilter character makes it work. It gives the two a Nick Nolte-Eddie Murphy vibe. Arthur, however has gotten a little boring. He’s an exhausted parent of a newborn shuttling from surf to shore doing the hard thankless task of being King of Atlantis and its watery bureaucracy. There’s an also a plague that hasn’t been seen for eons to deal with. And ecological doomsday threatened by a maniacal madman, Manta (Yahya Abdul-Masteen II).

Everything is tangentially related to orichalcum, which in real life is an alloy beloved by the ancients for its resemblance to gold. In Aquaman’s world, it’s a substance the ancients used to generate power that has nearly destroyed the world because — as Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) explains to her sons — it emits a whole lot of greenhouse gases. Obviously, bad guys like Black Manta want this substance, and will stop at nothing, not even the destruction of the planet, to get it and the power it brings.

What keeps the movie working is director James Wan. Here, he melds his standard creepiness aesthetic to adventure tropes and pulls off a passable movie. The constant influence homages from Japanese monster movies to Mad Max and Indiana Jones, all done with a light touch, must have entertained him while directing this schlock.

Unfortunately cinematic governance is not as much fun as building digital worlds, so this sequel has half the fun and more of the glum of the original. That happens when a director tries to up the charm on the dull character while lowering the charisma on the fun one. Still, the movie is clever enough, and plenty scary, and there is a sufficient number of jokes to keep the whole thing from getting too self-important.