Fish Boy

Matt Zoller Seitz, at Roger Ebert’s film review site, has a glowing review of Aquaman.

It takes skill to be as ridiculous as this movie about a half-human, half-Atlantean prince who’s known on land as Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) without seeming to condescend to the material.

He gets that this is an over the top superhero movie. It’s not meant to be a magnum opus on humanity’s disgusting defilement of the oceans and seas. That’s assuredly touched on though.

He (Aquaman’s half brother Orm) creates giant tidal waves that crash across the planet and deposit reefs of sewage, refuse and warships on the world's beaches. We humans befouled nature; nature turns around and befouls us. That seems like justice. (source)

With that move, I was totally rooting for Orm and wanted to see more of this ocean's revenge stuff. Not in the cards though. It turns out that Orm was a conniving, power-mad, totalitarian shitheel all along. Throwing our trash back at us was his only cool play.

Now, as beautiful as Momoa’s Aquaman is, it took me a bit to get totally behind his character. Warum? He struck me, at first, as supremely overconfident, flip, not a deep thinker and just barely this side of frat boy. 

Nope.

Considering his prodigious skills and talents, he’s got a ways to go before he reaches undeserved levels of self-confidence. Yes, he is flip but humor is necessary for surviving this crazy life. Humor in the face of mountains of fear and horror is helpful to say the least. Aquaman’s no Rachel Carson of the deep but he’s not an idiot. This is a comic-book movie hero—it's absurd to expect him to rise to deep documentary scientist levels.

The flick was flawed and derivative—the Atlantean soldier outfits put Star Wars Stormtroopers in mind, one of their war machines looked an awful lot like an Imperial Walker, etc. Still, this was an awful lot of fun. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

The visuals, both on and in water, were abso-fucking-brill—just gorgeous. I’d love to know how everything was created and filmed. Once again, I'm jumping into this fantasy alt-reality of mine. Instead of, post-carnival, moving to Boston, I lit out for California and scored a gig creating fantasy/science fictional worlds—Aquaman's Atlantis, Black Panther's Wakanda, Roy Batty's BladeRunner.

Maybe in another lifetime?