There was once a time when a film as nakedly terrible as Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom would become its own spectacle. It’d be celebrated, ironically, as another Highlander II: The Quickening or Battlefield Earth – a banquet of nonsense for future inebriated university students to feast on. But the superhero market has thoroughly annihilated that joy. Now, it’s somehow possible to watch Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman straddle a CGI robot shark and feel… nothing at all.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the latest entry in the rogues’ gallery of brainless franchise films. It is yet another reminder that cinema is locked in a corporate chokehold, robbing artists of the ability even to flail about in style anymore. Director James Wan had, at one point, confidently set his sights on making a spin-off horror film The Trench (focusing on a mysterious, eldritch rival to Aquaman’s home world, Atlantis) but instead has had to clumsily condense those ideas into background fodder for the franchise’s returning villain, Black Manta.
