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Aquaman Movie Review

“He’s living proof our people can coexist.  He could unite our worlds one day.” - Queen Atlanna
Aquaman is a superhero action movie directed by James Wan and starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Dolph Lundgren, Willem Dafoe, Nicole Kidman, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.  It tells the story of Arthur Curry (Momoa) a.k.a. Aquaman, and his fight against King Orm (Wilson) to prevent war in Atlantis from coming to the surface.
Aquaman has a lot of things to like about it.  For example, I thought there were some cool visuals, and the colors were very pretty.  I liked the soundtrack, and the story was interesting. I thought that the way that Aquaman was portrayed in the movie was really cool, because you don’t really get to see many superheroes in DC movies that can find ways to laugh at themselves and make jokes in the heat of battle.  I thought that the majority of the acting in this film was pretty good for the most part, and I thought that Momoa and Wilson especially did a good job.
This film reminded me of four things mashed together: cartoons, video games, anime, and comics.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, though. This movie knows what it is, and what it wants to be.  Probably my favorite part of this movie is the fight scenes between Aquaman and Ocean Master. The fight scenes between these two characters really call back to ‘80’s anime and superhero cartoons.  In them, are lots of standoffs, flowing capes, ridiculous costumes, manly screaming, muscles, soaring jumps, superman punches, macho dialogue, and cheesy one liners. I loved all of this. This is exactly what I was looking for in Aquaman.  
Now for the things that I didn’t like.  One of the things I noticed immediately, as soon as it presented itself, was just how terrible Willem Dafoe’s de-aging makeup was.  It was awful. It looked about as fake as fake can get. It looked as if the man was a life sized plastic doll. The cgi was not great either.  It looked as if it was straight out of a video game, and they relied on it way too much. There was a lot of forced dialogue, and the script was overall pretty clunky.  I thought that the film was way too long, and it easily could’ve been cut down at least a half hour.
Overall, I thought Aquaman could’ve been a lot better, had they fixed a lot of technical issues.  In the end, this movie was just merely okay. It was an average film, and I’m a little disappointed that it wasn’t nearly as good as it could’ve been.  It’s a fun watch maybe once, but it doesn’t really have much to offer beyond that.
Rating: PG-13

Grade: C

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