Aquaman (2018)

Have you ever wanted to see a military-grade whale? Or a battle-squid? 
Here’s your chance!

“Aquaman” (2018) proves that “Wonder Woman” (2017) wasn’t a fluke - Warner Brothers has finally figured out their secret recipe for making good superhero movies: no letting Zach Snyder be the director.
Seriously - the best two DCEU movies so far have been directed by people who aren’t Snyder. He got an ‘executive producer’ credit, but they clearly didn’t let him near the cutting room floor or into the production meetings. Good job, WB.

Through my super secret hacking powers, I got a chance to watch “Aquaman” in theaters a week before global release (Amazon Prime had a special deal with the studio for a single showing at a handful of theaters across the country tonight).

Let’s start with this: there’s nothing new in this movie. We’re a decade into the super hero craze, and a millennia into story telling.
If you took “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” (2001), “Avatar” (2009), “Iron Man 2” (2010), “Thor” (2011), “Black Panther” (2018), and a few English legends and put them all in a blender, you’d get “Aquaman.” 
But, obviously, you’re not going to watch five movies back to back and then brush up on your folklore, so this is a pleasantly succinct way to consume all of that in a brisk 2-hour film.

The best part of this was the visuals. Everything on screen was gorgeous.
That said, almost everything on screen was also a CGI render.
Like “Avatar” from the end of the oughts, this movie put a lot of effort into the visuals, with many of those visuals being phosphorescent lighting, which looked very pretty. 
I’m sure the cast spent a lot of time feeling very silly in front of a green screen.
This movie MUST be viewed on a large-format display of your choosing. If the first time you ever see this is on the 5” screen of your phone, you’re doing yourself a massive disservice.

Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo from “Game of Thrones”) and Amber Heard (from a bunch of stuff I’ve never seen before) made for great on-screen chemistry, with just enough quippy dialog to be entertaining, without going too far and becoming annoying.
At one point, Heard got painfully close to the ‘born sexy yesterday’ trope when she ventured on land, but director James Wan quickly steered away from that.

Speaking of James Wan: for a guy who has almost-exclusively horror movies to his name, he did an outstanding job with a super hero comic adaptation film!

And speaking of Heard: Heard’s costume design included a green unitard and a bright red wig. She looked like the living embodiment of 1998’s Ariel from “The Little Mermaid.” I hope that when Disney decides to do the inevitable live-action remake of it, they chose Heard with the exact same getup. She’s seriously spot-on.

The soundtrack was good, in that it fit the scenes you were watching. It was not, however, good enough for me to ever want to listen to again purely for aural enjoyment.
You can hear a very heavy specific electric cello line that was clearly influenced by the awesome power of the “Wonder Woman” theme from last year.
The sound effects themselves were great - all of the scenes with under water dialog had a weird audio distortion trick that sounded like the things I heard when I’ve gone scuba diving, so kudos to the audio team for nailing that.

As for the plot: I mentioned above that it’s roughly a combination of a bunch of movies you’ve probably already seen. There was a ‘man vs self’ thread and with two villains - big bad and little bad. Little bad was stupid and pointless and looked like a discarded “Power Rangers” henchman.
They only referenced “Justice League” once, and didn’t mention a single other super hero from the larger DCEU. This absolutely helped this movie develop itself and its own characters without getting bogged down by everything that has come before.

My major critique was that I only saw one octopus and zero cuttlefish. Shame on you for that oversight WB/James Wan. This was a movie about life in the Atlantic ocean; I know both of those things live there in spades.

I went into this with fairly low expectations, and was pleasantly blown away.
Hopefully WB keeps up this non-Snyder trend. If they do, they might actually be able to right their DCEU ship.
When “Aquaman” comes out in your local theater next weekend, go see it on the biggest screen you can find. IMAX preferably.