Jason Momoa Is the Larger-Than-Life Superhero 'Aquaman' Needed
Following up the failure of 2017's Justice League, the rushed crown jewel in the DC Extended Universe (aka the recent, flawed series of movies adapted from DC Comics), is an awkward task but a theoretical cinch. Sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into product to catch up with Marvel Studios, Warner Bros. never really allowed Justice League to be a movie, instead turning it into a mad dash to replicate the feat Marvel pulled off with The Avengers in 2012 in a fraction of the time at a considerably higher cost.
Doing better than Justice League, in other words, doesn't take much. In a way, it's appropriate that WB picked Aquaman, of all projects, as the chaser for Justice League: Coming out of 2017, the DCEU already looked like it was underwater. The story of a fish-boy who grows into a fish-man and is charged with uniting the seven fish kingdoms, Aquaman puts genre wunderkind James Wan in the director’s chair, with Jason Momoa reprising the character following Zack Snyder's meandering superhero rumpus.
But is Momoa up to raising the bar for the DCEU movies?
Wan's pedigree is defined in part by dollars. Give the guy a modest budget and put him at the helm of a horror flick, C-grade or more respectable, and he'll make you millions (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring). Hand him the keys to the most expensive ride in your garage, and he'll make you billions, as he oh-so-savvily did with 2015's Furious 7. Wan isn't the question mark in Aquaman. It's Momoa. Sure, everybody loves to love Jason: Already well-liked by geeks thanks to Stargate Atlantis, Momoa became unforgettable the world over in just one season of Game of Thrones, and whether in bit parts on Drunk History or supporting roles in gonzo genre-benders like The Bad Batch, he keeps finding ways to maintain his grizzled cool-dude image without wearing it out.
The real question is: Is he a leading man? Can he translate his best successes, mostly minor, into the kind of stardom that's necessary to hold up tentpoles? In short: Yes. Aquaman rules, and Momoa rules in it, reminding us that though Justice League's screenplay appeared tailor-made to turn him into a finned meme, he had a ball playing the character regardless. Released from the crippling demands of franchise maintenance, Momoa has room to breathe and fill up the screen with his charisma, derived as much from his inborn swagger as his glorious mane and ferocious beard. The film lets him explore Arthur Curry's interior while flexing his exterior, finding pathos in his struggle to reconcile his dual identities as a surface dweller and as the true heir to the throne of Atlantis.
That there's a lot of movie in Aquaman makes Momoa's job a bit complicated. He has to keep his position in the center while Wan lays out Arthur's origin story, introduces two of the character's comic-book nemeses, gives him a love interest, and saddles him with a destiny he must fulfill in order to save the world. We learn immediately that Arthur is the son of Thomas Curry (Temuera Morrison), a Māori lighthouse keeper living in Maine, and Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), princess of Atlantis, who washes ashore on Thomas' island during a nor'easter. They fall in real, passionate love, but of course Atlanna has to flee to Atlantis to protect Thomas and Arthur from the kingdom's revenge on the family, and Arthur grows up an outcast, a boy from two worlds deprived of his only connection to one of them.
Adult Arthur protects the seas from threats, including pirates like Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). But his birthright calls him to the home he never knew when his half-brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson), coerces other aquatic kingdoms into declaring war on the surface, and from there Aquaman gets weird in a good way. The film is a literal trip. Wan takes viewers location-hopping from New England to the Sahara to Sicily; he makes full use of the dollars backing him in each frame, tying together psychedelic visuals and two-fisted adventure with enough cinematic reference points that you'll run out of fingers to count them before the first hour’s done. Jam the entire ecosystem of ‘80s sword-and-sandal fantasy movies in a blender with The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Flash Gordon, The Fifth Element, Indiana Jones, and The Descent, and you more or less have a grasp on what Wan's shooting for here. It's enough computer-generated madness and set-piece mania that any talented movie star could lose themselves in it.
Momoa, however, jumps headfirst into Aquaman's material, pushing the boundaries of his caddishness to see how much he can get away with. In the short lineage of the DCEU, this playful quality is surprisingly refreshing. Director Patti Jenkins and star Gal Gadot do the same in Wonder Woman, but Princess Diana's a more serious character in a more straight-faced movie. Arthur is something of a slacker demigod who'd as soon forget about Atlantis and politics and martial conflict and just get drunk with his dad, and the movie built around him features fish-soldiers riding sharks and mosasaurs into battle against crab-men. There’s also a Godzilla-like creature voiced by OG Mary Poppins Julie Andrews.
It's dizzying, delightful, and completely bonkers. And Momoa, with sly grins, a flip of a duster coat, a steely gaze at the camera, and an earnestly delivered low-key punchline, fits right at home among its excesses. He's a larger-than-life personality well-suited to a larger-than-life blockbuster.
To give full credit, Momoa gets considerable help from his supporting cast, whether Wilson as the perfectly oily villain, Willem Dafoe as Arthur's mentor in all things Atlantean, or, most of all, Amber Heard as his sidekick and main squeeze-to-be, Mera. She’s the Leia to his Han Solo, a no-nonsense foil for Momoa's incorrigible goof-off heroism. She pumps life and purpose into him as surely as Justice League denied him both.
With Aquaman, Momoa has shaken off Snyder's myopic filmmaking in exchange for Wan's flexible, unabashed direction. He more than fills out that strange skin-tight gold-and-green suit; he makes it flourish.
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