As a longtime Aquaman believer, beyond the weirdness of Mera’s wig, everything about the movie looks like a whole lot of fun and I am so excited to see Lisa Bonet’s husband completely take over as the mainstream vision of Aquaman for the masses.
With December coming closer, it’s no surprise the people at Warner Bros. and DC have started putting out some great things to get us more interested in the next installment in the DCEU. This featurette is really effective not just because it shows just how much effort the cast, crew, and director James Wan himself put into making this movie work on a cinematic level, but also how people really invested in telling the story of Aquaman on multiple levels of existence.
In the video, Jason Momoa says that this is their “outer space” with how Wan explores the depths of the ocean. As a frequent NatGeo watcher, that really resonated with me because it’s true, there is so little that we truly know about the ocean and being able to take that very tangible piece of our world and make it new and mysterious again is what good storytelling is supposed to do.
“You’re pretty much just limited by your own imagination,” Wan says in the video. And if there is one thing Wan is known for, it’s being someone with a huge imagination.
I’m also super impressed at the intense training the actors went under. Amber Heard (Mera) says in the video that she did four and half months of stunt training for six days a week. That exhausts me just thinking about it and I’m really excited to see Mera in action. Heard and many other have sung the future Queen of Atlantis’ praises saying that she is no “damsel in distress. She’s a strong, badass, empowered superhero,” which is always something to look forward to in a superhero movie.
Making a very un-green return to comic book movies we also get a glimpse at Willem Dafoe’s Nuidis Vulko, who is an Atlantean advisor that becomes a mentor to Arthur and provides some training on how to be a proper Atlantian. Having grown up on Dafoe’s Green Goblin, I’m just happy to see him in a comic book movie again, even though he’s going to most likely be playing someone much less hammy than Norman Osborn.
We still have some time before they come out, but as far as I’m concerned, both Aquaman and Shazam! have seemed to really capture some much-needed levity and artistic direction when it comes to the DCEU. Wonder Woman may finally have some friends in the good movie pile from that cinematic universe. I’m looking forward to seeing Black Manta in action as well. After Black Panther, I realized how much we’d been longing for some good black supervillains.
Aquaman will be released in theaters on December 21, 2018
(image: Screengrab)
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