Before I saw this I accidentally glimpsed a review that stated this film was “The DC Black Panther (and much better than the MCU one). To which I say…….nothing because I’m too busy laughing. Aquaman is good, but not better than that. It looks great at parts, and the opening fight scene is better than a lot of the Marvel fights purely on the basis it doesn’t do that “cut before every punch lands” thing that Marvel does, it holds on the action so you see contact and it makes it seem real. But that opening fight scene? Takes place like 15 or 20 minutes in. Before that we get the character backstory. So, we get the backstory to someone we’ve already seen in two movies already. A backstory that’s not really needed, certainly not seen. All of it could have been just dropped throughout the film. I mean, yeah that would have meant not opening the film with Nicole Kidman, but it would have meant opening the film with your main character. The way it’s done is like it’s trying to build up audience excitement to see the character, like it’s building up his appearance, but we’ve already seen him in other films. By the time the character comes around I was actually kind of bored., which was my main issue with the film, it was WAY too long. It’s nearly 2 and a half hours, yet contains only 2 hours of film. There’s A LOT of filler in this movie, so many moments just happens to either pad out the runtime, or because they want to put an action scene in.

There are a few other problems, but a lot of them are personal preference. Like people dismiss the idea of Atlantis existing, but this is a world where Superman exists, and Aquaman has been seen with him. The catfish is out of the bag when it comes to heroes etc in this universe, you can’t pretend people are surprised or don’t believe in this.

I have been negative against this film, and I think I’m making it sound worse than it actually is. Truth is, it’s not a bad movie, it’s just dull and formulaic. There’s very few moments in it which will surprise you, it mostly does EXACTLY what you expect it do, all the time. I find it hard to hate this movie because it does have moments of greatness (the way they play with the “random biker assholes start a bar fight with the main character” trope was hilarious), but not enough of them, and they’re usually just fleeting. Also, the main villain reminded me too much of Randall from Clerks and it kept putting me off: