Is squid ink piss?

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom marks the final nail in the coffin of the DC Extended Universe and at this point I’m really only interested in one question; How is Peacemaker Season 2 going to address the continuity changes between the DCEU and DCU? I bet it will be silly! But that’s a story for late 2024 when the DCU material starts coming out. Until then we’re going to have to sit here for two hours until we can say goodbye to our favorite man Jason Mimosa.

Directed by James Wan and written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick who both also worked on Aquaman as well as those Conjuring movies, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom picks up a few years after the end of the original. Jason Momoa pretends his underwater fish powers are just CG as he reprises his role of Arthur Curry, aka, Aquaman. Arthur in the time since we last saw him has had a kid with his wife Mera (Amber Heard) who doesn’t have a lot of scenes in this film for reasons I won’t get into mostly because I don’t care and didn’t follow any of it. Arthur is getting used to life being both a dad and a king, even if we never see him complain once about people touching the thermostat.

The bad news is that David Kane (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) aka Black Manta hasn’t stopped being a jerk in the years since the last movie took place. Black Manta is still on the revenge path against Arthur for killing his dad, and wants to burn all of Atlantis to the ground and kill everyone. A hard task for a civilization that exists completely underwater, but that certainly hasn’t stopped him before. Black Manta’s new plot involves bank heists of orichalcum deposits and heating the globe’s climate. Also he has his own trident, but it’s a black evil trident. Man, this really feels like a silver age storyline.

In true DC fashion, Arthur must rescue and team up with his estranged brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) so they can lay down a whooping on Black Manta and that dastardly Nereus (Dolph Lundgren), a bad guy who looks like a villain out of Destiny 2. Oh and Nicole Kidman is back as Atlanna. Newly appearing for Aquaman 2 is one of my personal favorites; Randall Park as Dr. Stephen Shin because no matter what role Park appears in he will inevitably be a doctor. Randall Park’s talents were woefully underutilized for this film, although he does tend to play the exact same person in everything.

Arthur Jr. is played by several babies one of whom is named Tyler Burger which makes Momoa’s repeated lines about wanting to eat a burger still completely irrelevant in any context. See what I did there? The only big name we’re missing is Willem Dafoe who didn’t appear in the film due to scheduling conflicts.

The highlight of Aquaman 2 is in Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson just doing bro shit for a good majority of the film. I’ve been on the disagreeing end with some of my friends on the DC films, but I do believe that the movies are at their best when it’s superheroes doing superhero stuff and the sillier the better. If The Flash continued the tone of Flash microwaving a baby like a frozen burrito, it would’ve been an easy C+.

And DC has always had this feeling of analog combat, by which I mean it feels like we’re watching real people in a real environment fighting as opposed to CG blowing up CG stuff and people who might not even be on the same set filming on the same day punching each other. Quantumania looked like actors on a CG screen barely given instructions on what they were looking at. Aquaman 2 looks like actors on a real set with real costumes interacting with each other.

There’s also just something trippy about the scenes where characters are underwater and their hair is constantly waving around them. You can tell they put a lot of work into that CG tech for the underwater hair and it looks pretty good. And again I’d like to point out how charming Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson are, and how their bro story really propels the film to deeper Deppths than we could have hoped for. It’s almost enough to make me overlook that the film has a baby CGI pee into Jason Momoa’s mouth at least twice.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is a fantastic actor that I felt the script didn’t give proper attention to. Black Manta’s presence in this film has been reduced to basically a zombie, propelled by a single thought that has basically stripped away anything resembling a real personality. His presence is just to repeat beats from the first movie but a little different.

Aquaman 2 is utterly silly from start to finish. It doesn’t have the same cinematography style or colors that the first one had, and for that I’m a little disappointed. But the ridiculous action sticks from start to finish and despite how badly the DCEU shit the bed over the last few years this is probably the best way they could have sent it off outside of maybe a Suicide Squad 3 directed by James Gunn.

We have no clue if Jason Momoa or even Aquaman for that matter will reappear in the DCU, but considering the first upcoming bit is Creature Commandos, this might be the most interested I’ve been in superhero stuff at least since Ms. Marvel. The film’s success definitely wasn’t helped by James Gunn announcing the franchise was dead well before it had a chance to prove itself in theaters. Looking forward to when I’m bored enough to watch Blue Beetle.

Rating: B+