Review: Aquaman

Experiments in time in an inspired superhero spectacle

I’m worried when we might go next. Arthur Curry, also known as Aquaman, is wrestling his half-brother Orm above a pit of underwater lava for the crown of Atlantis. A colosseum full of Atlanteans rings with cheers. The screen flashes orange and blue as the camera spins around the men, showing the lava and ocean in turn and dressing the image in swathes of colour. Sure, there are stakes: if Orm wins, he will become Ocean Master and attack the surface. Another impending superhero disaster. But Arthur has only been in Atlantis for a few minutes and the movie has barely started. More importantly, I have only been in Atlantis for a few minutes, and already I’m wonderfully lost in its sights and sounds and in the long, digital shots that Aquaman uses to welcome me to this city and to this fight. I couldn’t care less about what’s happening in the story; I’m having too much fun.

This early fight is representative of Aquaman as a whole, as an increasingly rare kind of blockbuster film unafraid to be creative in its world-building and form. Here, an octopus plays the drums and jellyfish act as spotlights, revealing towering statues surrounding the colosseum and dressed in seaweed. At other times, Willem Dafoe rides a hammerhead shark; Dolph Lundgren leads an army on seahorses. There’s a laser war between crab-people and great white sharks. There’s even a glimpse of steampunk mechas.

These icons make up the movie’s endearing excess—excess that informs each performer’s commitment to their part, including Patrick Wilson’s delightful, villainous exaggerations as Orm. More interesting, to me, than the icons themselves is how Aquaman presents them. The fight with Orm is shot in long, digitally-enhanced takes, letting the camera rush after each impact and bend around each movement until the shot breaks. This direction makes the combat in Aquaman not only legible but tangible; the camera moves with the same fluidity as water. When the fight is cut short, Mera and Arthur escape Atlantis—one of the few character-motivated transitions in a movie more interested in exploring the dynamics of its fantasy spaces than wasting time explaining how we get there.

I’m worried about when we might go next, because in Aquaman, each space contains multiple times. When each shot is so digitally obscene, so full of computer-generated imagery, it might leap forward or backward in time at any moment. In the movie’s opening sequence, Thomas Curry, a lighthouse keeper, finds Queen Atlanna unconscious, washed up on the shore. Once he helps her to heal and she explains how she’s escaped Atlantis, their love spans years. It, too, plays out in long, single takes, laying time across the space of the lighthouse. Later, when Mera and Arthur dive into the ocean to go to Atlantis, time turns backward. As the camera dives with them and passes from air to water, they change into a younger Arthur and his mentor, Nuidis Vulko, who teaches him how to use his powers. An endless number of times fit into one space. Memory always returns, always informs the present. In Aquaman, places have memories, too. 

The spatialization of time makes perfect sense in a film about a fallen city, with scattered peoples and histories. If when drives the ideas behind Aquaman, where drives the plot. Arthur travels the globe to find a mythic trident; Orm visits each surviving community of Atlantis to convince them to join his cause. Long takes bring the past into the present, and the movie is structured around visiting and spatially exploring those pasts. Digital effects turn back aging as Kidman, Dafoe, and Morrison are de-wrinkled and pulled out of time by a combination of makeup and CGI. This reverse-aging suits a movie whose conflicts revolve around family: early in the movie, Arthur ruptures the Kane pirate family, edging David to become Black Manta; Atlantean law forces Orm to fight Arthur for the title of Ocean Master. Only the characters that age, that span past and present—namely Kidman and Morrison—carry the emotional core of the movie. Their love story frames the narrative and offers an alternative to an unproductive violence.

Aquaman understands that action is only another facet of melodrama, two sides of the same coin. Digital effects might be most apparently tactile in moments of spectacle, but the same techniques are used for romance. I am just as awestruck by the energy of the fight, atop Sicilian rooftops, between Arthur and Black Manta as I am by the following scene, where Mera and Arthur’s ship drifts towards an endless horizon line. At the bow of the boat, in an orange and blue sunset, Mera plays the recorder as Arthur wakes with seaweed bandaging his wounds. Action, then serenity. Two ways to feel. In this melodramatic excess is a potential use of digital effects and production: to stretch the limits of time and space in new forms of fantasy.