Weekly Watchlist - 4th January 2024

Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom and Rebel Moon : Part One - A Child of Fire

Well, I hope everyone had a lovely festive break. However, by the end of this article, you might think I’ve turned into The Grinch over the last few weeks.

I really enjoy the holidays, but it’s especially good for catching up with new movies, or ones I might have missed earlier in the year.

Last week, I managed to watch Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom and Rebel Moon : Part One - A Child of Fire which are two movies whose titles are more interesting than the actual films.

As I mentioned previously, character and performances trump plot and spectacle in all my favourite films. That being said, if you’re movie is based around spectacle over everything else, and even that fails, then you’ve got a problem.

The first Aquaman film was released in 2018. It told the story of Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) and how he went from a superhero as part of the Justice League, to King of Atlantis after defeating his evil half brother. It was totally goofy but quite good fun, and went on to gross over $1 billion at the worldwide box office.

So, I went to see Lost Kingdom with my son, who is a big fan of the original, and we both had relatively high hopes. Unfortunately, these were dashed pretty quickly.

This time around, our marine based hero has got married to Mera (Amber Heard), had a little goldfish controlling baby and discovered that being in charge of everything is really all a bit boring. Luckily for him, Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a C-class villain from the first movie, is back and seeking revenge for Aquaman killing his father, by discovering some hastily created weapons that no one had heard off before, and an ancient trident thing that controls undead armies.

All this forces Arthur to break his (evil) half brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) out of jail, so the plot can move clunkily forward and he can help defeat this new threat whilst trading supposedly witty banter and japes in what is meant to be a buddy comedy type thing. Now, all this could have been quite light hearted and jolly, but it turns boring and sluggish very quickly.

Chunks of dull and dreary exposition are inserted in between emotionally weightless set pieces with some truly terrible CGI. It’s like the outtakes that were deemed unsuitable for Avatar or, even, Wakanda Forever. I thought they were the worst effects I had seen, or would see, for some time. Little did I know!

It borrows scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean, Kong : Skull Island, The Matrix and, of course, Star Wars to mention just a few other franchises I’d rather be watching.

Yet again, we are faced with humourless characters that are so prevalent in the DCEU. It’s like most of their scripts have been written by the original version of ChatGPT before that was even a thing. They’re so predictable and painfully bland, even when delivered by decent actors who must know they’re spouting absolute nonsense that just arrives lifeless and leaden on the screen.

Here, the dialogue between Momoa, doing his fratboy routine, and Wilson, playing the straight man, should be the highlight but just feels forced and a bit desperate, as if they’re trying to distract you from the thunderously dull plot.

There’s some stuff in here about global warming and how humanity is destroying the planet. Whilst it obviously very important, we’ve heard it all before, and delivered in a much subtler and more devastating way by any number of films previously.

All this trundles us towards the finale which is just another CGI borefest like so many of the previous entries in this shambolic franchise.

Very much a damp squid for the current iteration of the DCEU to end on. And to think, it had started on such a high note.

Zack Snyder, director of the very scary Dawn of the Dead remake, the gloriously absurd but wild and kinetic 300, and even with the flawed but ambitious pair of Watchmen and Sucker Punch, seemed liked an obvious choice to direct a Superman movie. Throughout all his films he had successfully blended comic book sensibilities with good, solid story telling and arresting visuals, so when it was announced he would kick off the first chapter of this DC extended universe to rival Marvel, with one of it’s most popular characters, there was almost universal acknowledgement that Warner Brothers had got this one right.

Man of Steel is not a light hearted romp like the Christopher Reeve movies and, as such, takes itself a tad too seriously, something that would become even more prevalent in later instalments, but is helped with a great cast (Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Laurence Fishburne, Russell Crowe) who bring life and charisma to their characters, and Snyder shows off his talent with some truly jaw dropping set pieces that are both operatic and brilliantly choreographed.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been a huge fan of his since. Batglum vs Superglum : Dawn of Glumness was just all noise and bluster, Justice League was a charmless mess in either version and, luckily, as I’m not a female journalist I won’t get death threats for saying that, whilst Army of the Dead had it’s moments, but was way too long and failed to capture the visceral tension of his zombie break out film.

However, I was looking forward to Rebel Moon as it had been described as a wholly original science fiction movie which, these days, is a very rare thing indeed.

Snyder has said that his latest, which is split into two parts with the conclusion coming later this year, started off as a pitch to Lucasfilm for a darker, more mature entry into the Star Wars universe. However, when it was rejected, he focussed on it becoming his own “crazy sci-fi movie” although still being inspired from “growing up as an Akira Kurosawa fan, a Star Wars fan” and a “love letter to the movies that made me love movies.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

From the story of a rag tag band of mercenaries and rebels trying to save the galaxy by taking on a fascist regime, to the opening scene of a large space cruiser passing over the hero’s home planet and then meeting a mysterious warrior with laser swords, it is not a love letter but a complete rip off. There’s hardly an original idea in any of this.

Again, if it’s done well, then you can sometimes get away with it. The Magnificent Seven is a brilliantly rollicking re-telling of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and George Lucas himself borrowed bits of the great man’s work as well as various other bits and bobs from Flash Gordon to Arthurian legend for his magnum opus.

Unfortunately, for Rebel Moon, it doesn’t have the story, atmosphere or enough memorable characters to pull it off.

Sofia Boutella tries her best as Kora, the leader of our rag tag bunch but with yet another weak script and very little chemistry between her and the other thinly drawn vagabonds played by genre stalwarts such as Djimon Hounsou, Michiel Huisman, Ray Fisher and Charlie Hunnam, you don’t really care who they are or what happens to them. Again it’s left to exposition dumps to make up for their lack of development. I mean one of them seems to have a character arc which consists of having to wear a shirt and then not having to wear a shirt. It really is that nonsensical.

The CGI is even worse than Aquaman and there’s one scene that looks like something put together on my old Commodore 64. That along with the much ridiculed slow motion, lens flare and science fiction baddies dressed as Nazis just make this one very (very) long cliche. I will not be holding my breath for the promised multiple directors cuts, or the sequel for matter.

So, there we are. Told you I was a bit grumpy. But, that’s what happens when I watch movies that are just not very good. Hopefully next week I’m going to see Ferrari which is Michael Mann’s first movie in nine years and looks pretty decent so I might be cheerier then.

Until next time.