Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom Doesn’t Give a Damn That the DC Universe Is Ending

Winningly goofy but blemished by behind-the-scenes tinkering, The Lost Kingdom is disappointing in the usual sequel way. Photo: Warner Bros./DC Comics

This review was originally published on December 22, 2023. It has been republished with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom now streaming on Max.

The last thing a patient viewer will see before the houselights rise on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is a giant robot tussling with monstrous tentacles — the vanity card of director James Wan’s production company, Atomic Monster. The snippet of animated kaiju mayhem is very much in the spirit of the movie it closes, a Saturday-morning cartoon of a blockbuster with a pronounced ’50s sci-fi influence, a real War of the Worlds quality. But isn’t some sort of cameo the expected reward for sitting through the endless roll call of overworked special-effects artists? The implied promise of Ben Affleck or Michael Keaton or at least George Clooney waiting on the other side?

The absence of a Batman, or any post-credits scene at all, would be less surprising if Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom were not the final installment in what has come to be known as the DC Extended Universe — that is, the superhero franchise Zack Snyder launched a decade ago with his brooding Man of Steel. Summer megaflop The Flash had some sense of finality and implied transition about it. This movie, not so much. It eschews all traces of valediction in favor of simply functioning as, well, a sequel to Aquaman, the proudly ridiculous 2018 vehicle for Jason Momoa’s underwater ass-kicker, a king with the hygiene and disposition of a Pantera roadie.

The lack of franchise-resolving ceremony is actually in keeping with Wan’s first Aquaman, which never let any larger Justice League business interfere with its ambition to cross a pro-wrestling match with the “Under the Sea� number from The Little Mermaid. You could even say that a stubborn refusal to put some big punctuation on this age of DC movies is in the born-loner spirit of Aquaman himself. It’s certainly the best thing about his second movie, an A-budgeted spectacle of B-movie pleasures baldly (and sometimes badly) pasted together in postproduction.

When we see him at the start of The Lost Kingdom, Momoa’s Arthur Curry isn’t quite the free spirit he once was. Since the events of Aquaman, he has reluctantly assumed the mantle of King of Atlantis and less reluctantly traded belching bachelorhood for family life, marrying the water-controlling Mera (Amber Heard) and fathering an heir, an infant learning to speak to fish before uttering his first word. As Incredibles 2 demonstrated, there’s comic potential in a hulking superhero settling down, changing diapers, etc. But if that were ever a big part of this movie, it was left on the cutting-room floor.

Instead, we deal with the reemergence of David Kane (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the vengeful pirate introduced as a secondary heavy in Aquaman. Abdul-Mateen once more brings a certain quiet, seething gravity to the role, and he still looks cool in his alien-bug headwear. But even with a promotion to main villain, his Black Manta can’t catch a break; you’ll lose track of the number of times he almost delivers a death blow before being knocked across the screen at the last moment. The movie hinges on his hunt for the fabled Black Trident, an ancient instrument of evil that allows Wan to indulge his usual appetite for all manner of supernatural, subterranean beasties.

There’s a major choppiness to all this setup. Even more so than The Marvels, from DC’s crosstown rival, The Lost Kingdom bears the impression of scenes excised and reshuffled. The movie keeps delivering key information through voice-over, including an expository research log by the Manta’s conflicted scientific ally (Randall Park). Equally conspicuous is the manner in which Wan juggles his cast of characters. Heard, in her first performance since the defamation trial brought by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, has been relegated to the margins of the plot. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman — returning as Aquaman’s once-estranged Atlantean mother — seems to appear out of nowhere, charging into a big battle scene without reintroduction. Both actresses get about as much screen time as the giant talking krill.

The Lost Kingdom finds its footing as dumb fun only once Aquaman is forced to spring and then join forces with the warmonger villain of the original, his imprisoned brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson). The film explicitly acknowledges that their sibling rivalry is very Thor and Loki, though the dynamic here is different with Wilson playing uptight preppy to Momoa’s jocular biker viking. The mid-film start of their tropical buddy comedy also activates Wan’s creature-feature aspirations as he subjects his mismatched duo to a menagerie of monsters: giant bugs straight out of King Kong, skeleton soldiers of Ray Harryhausen vintage, the best of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Nothing looks real. Not the wildlife, not the avatar-on-avatar fight scenes, and certainly not Atlantis, a glowing eyesore metropolis about as immersive and convincing as fish-tank décor. At one point, we go inside Manta’s massive old-world battleship and it’s like something out of an Austin Powers movie, a roomy Dr. Evil lair. While plenty of superhero movies devolve into rubbery CGI slop, the Aquaman films rarely graze anything resembling physical reality; they exist in a heightened cartoon realm of merman slapstick and lusty, talking sea gangsters voiced by Martin Short.

Winningly goofy but blemished by behind-the-scenes tinkering, The Lost Kingdom is disappointing in the usual sequel way: It rearranges without deepening the elements people liked about its predecessor; even the cast is almost exactly the same with the notable exception of Willem Dafoe, who has sadly not returned to ride a giant seahorse again. Still, there’s something almost noble about the film refusing to devote even a single second to the business of resetting a franchise. The second Aquaman, like the first, is true to itself: a chintzy blast of machismo every bit as disinterested in regime change as its bulky hero is. Let’s hope there’s room for such defiance in the new DC universe that this protector of the deep has declined to set up.