Between a production riddled with trouble, the unavoidable studio meddling, and James Gunn’s incoming DC Universe franchise, the odds were unreasonably stacked against Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and ending the DC Extended Universe on a sour note seemed all but unavoidable.
But in no way does that mean Lost Kingdom is beyond critique, especially when it seems all but determined to close out this particular shared universe with the wettest fart possible by being the purest, most undiluted melting pot of superhero fatigue narrative fuel it could muster. Its modus operandi? Refusing to play.
Indeed, with the nature of the worlds they’re set in, to say nothing of the egregiously generous budgets they tend to be given, superhero movies are constantly in prime position to sink their teeth into a limitless genre fiction playground, so the fact that so many of them tend to fall back on safe, run-of-the-mill plots is incalculably disappointing. Those same films also tend to boast an allergy to any meaningful theme—which, like their plot potential, should know zero bounds—so it’s no wonder that disappointment has come to be associated with the genre.
And Lost Kingdom just might be the biggest offender yet. It had ample opportunity, for example, to explore the nuances of family with quite a bit of depth, from Arthur’s newly-acquired fatherhood status to the reunion with his brother Orm, but no such idea is ever given any room to breathe. Instead, Lost Kingdom opts to briefly signal a handful of safely agreeable values before drowning everything out in orchestral suites, undersea special effects, and overlong shots of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II standing menacingly.
From there, it’s the same jumble of exposition, MacGuffins, CGI minions, and predictable, stunt-heavy set pieces that tend to fill in the gaps left by any vacuum of inspiration in the superhero genre, and there’s absolutely no excuse for this to continue. With a wickedly fantastical network of underwater kingdoms as the setting and a wealth of characters with long, long histories to draw both thematic and arc-specific inspiration from, plugging in a formula like that is a devastating creative letdown, and the same could be said for many other superhero movies boasting similarly wondrous premises that were quickly fumbled.
Moral of the story? If you’re making a superhero movie, do something imaginative like the Spider-Verse films, or the Dark Knight trilogy, or Logan, or the first Incredibles movie, or literally anything other than what Lost Kingdom and quite a few of its contemporaries have done. You might still fail, but at least you’ll learn something from your failure, and that’s almost certainly more than can be said about Aquaman’s last hurrah in the DCEU.
(featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures)
