The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so. Even in Momoa’s first big heroic yes-folks-I’m-back shot, the actor’s face appears to have been grafted onto a digital body double, and the resultant visual looks less like Aquaman charging towards his foes in battle than squinting at them through the wrong side of a hotel door peephole.
Nicole Kidman, returning as Aquaman’s Aquamum, also appears ghoulishly disembodied in most of her scenes, while Amber Heard is given little to do as Queen Mera apart from hold a baby and get mown down by a laser cannon. And Patrick Wilson returns as Orm, which is handy for those of us who would make exactly that noise if asked to recall what it was he did in the first one.
Most perplexingly of all, no one has worked out how to make the underwater scenes work visually, which is less than ideal when they constitute 95 per cent of the film. Every shot is crowded with air bubbles and fishy crumbs floating around, while all of the dialogue has flubbety-blubbety sound effects laid over the top.
Ten minutes of this is funny. Twenty is annoying. Two hours of it is about as boring as cinema gets.
“Keep your eyes open,” Momoa bellows during the climactic showdown, to which John Rhys-Davies’s avuncular crab monster jokes: “That’s easy, my eyes don’t close!”
Audiences, however, may often find that they do.
