Directed by James Wan

Starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman

You know, I like goofy movies. I don’t have high standards, I judge films on the films themselves first, and then other factors eventually come into play. I applaud effort, and originality, and entertainment. I’m the guy that liked Justice League, and even Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur. I even loved the Power Rangers movie. But those are the good kinds of goofy. Aquaman is not. It’s the bad kind, my friends. The very bad kind. Now suddenly Widows is not the worst movie of 2018 as I have seen. Now that title belongs to Aquaman. This is the biggest piece of shit I have sat through all year. I am shocked and speechless. There is NO reason this movie should have sucked this hard. No reason for it to have been as boring and dull and lifeless as it is. DC is probably done for forever in terms of quality output, although Man of Steel will remain the worst thing they’ve ever produced.

What am I even supposed to talk about here? A movie about the superhero who can talk to fish, and it ends up being as useless as we all thought it would be. I liked Jason Momoa in Justice League, but here he is in a movie that doesn’t realize how uninteresting he is. Count the number of times “king” or “trident” or “Atlantis” is said. Or how often Arthur says, “This is awesome!”. There just isn’t much there.

The shocker here is that Nicole Kidman is not the worst part of this movie. I panicked when I first saw her onscreen, but she did grow on me and I liked her at least. I even enjoyed the very first action scene she’s in. The good stuff stops almost immediately. It did not take long for me to realize I did not like this movie. And it was a bit longer after that that I realized I despised it. And it was by the end that I knew I had seen the worst movie of this year.

The bright colors and vibrance of the underwater world will trick your eyes into seeing a not so bad production. But it is a disastrous failure. With uneventful and repetitive shots of fish and underwater creatures who are boring to the eyes even in the background. And you’d think the reveal of Atlantis to Arthur would be breathtaking. But it is as underwhelming, painfully so for a movie that should have gotten something like that right.

And the characters. Any person who likes this film, I DEFY you to tell me ONE thing Patrick Wilson was doing in this movie. He is cardboard, shamefully delivering lines like he wasn’t even on set. Wilson is usually a good actor, but here he is a joke. Wilem Dafoe too, of course a legend, is a joke. Every single word the two of these guys deliver is terrible. Every second they are onscreen (most of the movie) it is unwatchable. Why even cast these well knowns in this trash, when they are gonna say the lines like some first years out of acting school? What the fuck is the point.

And they float. In their stupid looking suits and their stupid looking mounted sea horses or whatever they are. And you can’t take a single thing that is said seriously. And James Wan slowly zooms in on all the conversations. Every. Single. Time. And all the dialogue is exposition cluttered with diplomatic bullshit jargon. And it’s so bad. You can barely hear what anyone is saying, and worse is NO ONE SHOULD CARE. The plot is reprehensible, with some painful attempts at messages at pollution and border control. You don’t get to talk about those things in a movie like this.

The flashbacks. The one where Arthur is a kid and stops the shark from ramming the walls in the aquarium isn’t so bad. But all the others, specifically with Wilem Dafoe training Arthur through his formative years, are 0/10. A training session on a beach with tridents with a teenage Arthur. They talk about his mother. A pause. “Does she not love me?” in this single most cringe inducing delivery of this entire year. This teenage kid may be the worst actor of all time. I was going to throw up.

I hate this fucking movie. I don’t even want to talk about the “plot”. But flash forward to when we first see Arthur as an adult, and he’s on a submarine. Or he’s stopping one that’s being hijacked by Manta and his team. Manta sucks. He’s a useless character. I knew we were in trouble from this entire sequence. With random guitar riffs playing once Momoa takes out some dudes. And then they just keep repeating it. Over. And over. AND OVER.

Manta’s father gets caught under something heavy and will drown. Manta begs for Aquaman’s help, who could easily save him. He doesn’t. Now there is the reason Manta wants to kill him, since obviously his dad ends up dying here. This scene is so stupid. I guess Aquaman deflects all bullets too. Or maybe that’s just the movie cutting on bullet shots and then back to Momoa to pretend like they all missed him. I guess.

What’s the story? Nicole Kidman is Arthur’s mother. She had him with a lighthouse keeper that is human. So Arthur is half Atlantean half human. And destined to become the next king. But he needs that legendary trident in all the fairy tales. Arthur thinks his mother was killed when he was a baby. She had another son, a pure bred Atlantean named Orm, that’s Patrick Wilson. There will be competition for the crown. Mera shows up. She’s the daughter of another sea King played by Dolph Lundgren. Oh my god this is so fucking stupid.

She pleads for Arthur to find the trident, so everyone will believe his is the rightful heir to the throne. I don’t care. I really don’t. This is one of the dopiest movies I have ever seen. If only that were a good thing. 80 percent of this film is exposition. I shit you not. All they do is talk. And you can’t hear half of what they say. And they talk some more. And then it cuts to two others characters and they talk. And everybody repeats the same things.

Orm wants to declare war on the surface. He teams up with Manta to fake an attack on the ocean world by a sub as a pretense to start the war. Like we haven’t seen that before. The action is so boring. So unfuckingbelievably dumb. Then Arthur and Orm have a one on one fight for the title of king. It’s not that compelling.

Mira helps Arthur escape the fight. Together they go on an adventure! In the desert. And they search for that trident. It was around here it hit me I wasn’t even half way through the movie. Then they eat flowers together in Italy. I wanted to run out of the theater.

A huge issue here is the tone. There isn’t one. The music is abysmal, a despicably wretched set of themes pasted together to pass as some epic score. And then they fuse some new age hip hop covering classic songs. Absolute trash. I think I heard a Pitbull cover of Africa’s Toto??? WHAT THE FUCK, NO ONE IS THIS BAD AT MAKING MOVIES

Jason Momoa is sorely out of place. He is playing the role as he did in Justice League (which I liked), as a humorous and playful one. But it doesn’t work here because the movie doesn’t allow it. It shoots for over dramatic sensation, and shitty melodrama. And so when Arthur cracks jokes you can’t even laugh. The timing and the soundtrack is all wrong. And the movie fails as a drama. It fails so fucking hard. Momoa and the movie are working on two different scripts.

And shame on the writers. This is one of the worst written movies of all time I think. There is nothing here. And what is there is tainted by the rest. And I burst out laughing when the movie decided to have a montage to encourage Manta to build his suit with Atlantean technology. I can not believe I’m talking about this.

And look. Many points in this movie I had my arms in the air in disbelief. And even still I sat forward intensely and hoped the film would convince me I was crazy to think it was so bad. But it never did. It only enforced it. And the dude in the row in front of me did the same. He leaned forward like he was interested during the fight scene in Italy. And then he walked out as soon as it was done. He came back in 5 or so minutes later and laid back in his seat and slouched in boredom. As did a lot of audience members.

Some people laughed at Momoa’s humor. Some. All of us should have been, but that disparity in the tone is jarring and wrong. The editors are awful. The writers are awful. The directing is just non existent. It is obvious James Wan directed this, it has the same flipped camera shot when people get slammed into the ground that was there in Furious 7, which wasn’t such a good movie either. He’ll probably never make a movie as good as the first Conjuring. But I’m astounded he keeps churning out these flashy and empty pieces. There’s no point to this movie at all. Even as superhero blockbuster fare. It fucking sucks.

Why is this movie 150 minutes? You could cut it down to the average 100 min length and have lost nothing. I wanted to leave so badly. I wanted to walk out but I didn’t. As I drove home the entire runtime sparked in my mind in an instant, and I gripped the wheel like violent talons, and screamed at the top of my lungs. It lasted just a second.

Last year, it was Alien Covenant and The Dark Tower that tied on my list for the worst movie of 2017. Now I have a parallel, the worst movie of this year may be a tie, between Widows and Aquaman. Two movies whose outcome I could not have possibly cared less about. Two movies I wanted to walkout before their half way points. This does not happen often with me people.

There is one cool scene in Aquaman. It’s when Arthur and Mira dive in and through The Trench, using a brightly lit flare to fend off the monsters around them. It isn’t much, but it was hella cool to see their bright redness hold off that swarm as they sped through the water. And it’s okay I guess how Arthur gets the Trident of Atlan. Which also grants him his orange and green suit, which looks pathetic. I guess legendary weapons now grant our heroes costume upgrades. But notice, no one cared that Thor magically got a new outfit after Stormbreaker summoned him back to health. Because the entire movement on Nidavellir was so beautiful. And we understood these things can happen with the powers of Stormbreaker and the Bifrost. And everyone lost their minds when Thor landed in Wakanda that it didn’t matter anyway. One of the best moments in movie history. Now Momoa walks through a waterfall in green and orange and I want to leave. I just want to go home.

And I think the very worst moment of 2018 is when Patrick Wilson says to a crab monster, “Call me…Oceanmaster”. I opened my mouth to scream in the theater. But nothing came out.

I suppose Arthur and Orm’s final fight is okay. I did like how Arthur spins his trident like how Dafoe taught him. But I hate everything else. This is one of the worst movies I have seen in a very long time. Because it was putting us all to sleep. And because the people who made this movie are too stupid to realize how dumb it all is. As soon as you have actors floating around like that you should have halted production until you could figure out how to not make it look terrible. And the script needed to be burned and never seen again. And Patrick Wilson and Dafoe should never have stepped foot on set. And half this movie should have been cut, and we’d have missed nothing. And that war at the end is so silly I can’t even comment. Fuck this useless piece of shit production. Even by DC’s horrible standards  this movie is truly bad. Just don’t even see it. There are so many better things you could do with your time then be talked down to by a movie like this. A movie that thinks it’s so good and that its audience is stupid. Fire anyone who approved the final cut of this movie. And everyone involved on the soundtrack. And all the writers. And Wan you should probably just stick to horror mate. Now the Nyquil is hitting me, and hopefully I forget about this movie like we are all destined to. And hopefully I don’t dream of fish.