>>283191>>283219Aquaman: Hope, Change - and All WetBy Armond White
Hollywood shortchanges Zack Snyder's mythic concept.
A he-man who swims, slithering through the ocean deep, then comes ashore to demonstrate his amphibious strength and superhero powers, the new live-action Aquaman is perfectly embodied by Jason Momoa. Zack Snyder first introduced Momoa during a teasing digression of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice in a sequence that promised other D.C. Comics characters would share a heroic-erotic mode. They would answer the millennium's politically depressed view of bravery, principle, and history with an atavistic ideal. (Sndyer must have heard Walter Hill's commendation from Bullet to the Head that Momoa was "a man among men.")
But now that the Aquaman movie is finally here - and is a record-breaking box-office hit - Snyder's aesthetic drive has been castrated. The Aquaman movie proceeds like a Marvel movie - an expanded generational narrative, starting with Aquaman's parents (Temereu Morrison as his Pacific Islander father and Nicole Kidman as Atlanna, his ocean-empress mother) and the birth of their demigod offspring named Arthur. ("Product of a love that never should have been.") This intro is Marvel-mundane, despite featuring a sped-up fantasy fight scene. The digital effects - overkill excitation - immediately ruin Snyder's almost tactile corporeal vision for emphasis on action and frantic stimulation that video-game and VR enthusiasts have come to prefer over cinema. Marvelized reviewers don't even appreciate the difference.
Plotwise, the adult Aquaman is called to defend his oceanic heritage, battling sea deities and human pirates in a global power struggle that is less a war between good and evil and more like the fake-spiritual, two-half-brothers antics of the puerile Thor films. I'd rather go fishing.
Momoa is the key to what's been lost: He has a broad, Biblical-movie face like Howard Keel's Saint Peter in Frank Borzage's The Big Fisherman. When underwater, his long caveman's mane floats - hackles up. His green-gold eyes tell more about possessing a mortal and immortal duo nature than does his adolescent confession. ("At a young age I learned not to show weakness. I'm a blunt instrument and
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