No love for the Burton Apes movie? I found I liked it once I got past the whole "this is dreadful" thing.
I am pretty sure that
Aquaman overall was quite rubbish, but I enjoyed it anyway, as it had good action and likeable characters to offset its shite story. What foul sorcery does Nicole Kidman practice to still look this way?
Nice to see a DC movie with amiable characters, and a protagonist that actually grows throughout the film and learns a worthwhile lesson, but sweet Christmas did the whole "let's do Arthurian myth because his name is Arthur" thing drop out of a cereal packet? I sincerely hope so, because I would be deeply worried if someone was paid money for it.
Momoa is very affable in this even when his whole deal at the start of the film is that he's an angry loner who shuns people because of his angry loner pain - and then the first thing he goes and does after saving the lives of a bunch of sailors is take his dad for a pint and then takes goofy selfies with bikers and then when Mera shows up sounding like a gothy teen saying people are rubbish, Arthur spends his time defending people and insisting they are inherently good and capable of change. He's like the antithesis of Clint Eastwood's arsehole character from those bare knuckle boxing films with the orange monkey, in that all the elements are there for a dreadful and unlikable character, but then he just does nice things and is nice to people. I mean, this is the exact opposite of what the script seems to want at that point (the point of contention between Arthur and Manta hinges on his being a darker, harder character), but I don't really mind, and I don't think most people would, either.
It is all over the place, but I suppose that helps when it turns into a mid-90s heavy metal album cover at the end complete with sick guitar riffs, warring monsters, and stacked ladies, and especial kudos to the makers for correctly identifying that mid-90s metal suffered from a severe lack of Dolph Lundgren with a pink beard. There are plenty of films coming out of Asia that look like this now that SFX technology is so cheap and easy to implement*, which kind of makes me wonder where they spent all the cash - and more importantly,
why, as the Sicily action sequence is probably the best one in the whole film, and only the bit with the fish aliens in the storm seemed like it took advantage of the budget to do something memorable rather than large-scale cgi for its own sake. Some of the cgi is a bit ropey, but what can you do?
Anyway, like I say, this is probably complete rubbish, but it's enjoyable rubbish, and it often illustrates that its heart is in the right place. Probably my favorite of the DCMU films so far.
* Though sadly nothing worth your time since
Space battleship Yamato, and while the likes of
Enthiran and
Ra.One were fun distractions, I have high hopes for
The Wandering Earth, though any breakout success for it will surely spell doom for that Seveneaves adaptation.
