A few weeks ago, I went to go see the new Aquaman 2: The Lost Kingdom movie, released in December 2023, and before I even went to see it I had low expectations for the film. To no surprise, my feeling towards the film upon finishing it were exactly how I imagined them to be, meh. The film was directed by James Wan as a sequel to another project of his Aquaman, released in 2018, which I thought to be a very unique and creative story for a lesser known DC character but this new movie sadly does not live up to the name the first movie game it. The story just wasn’t as impactful as the first one and it felt like a typical superhero movie where the hero has to stop the villain or they will destroy the world.
Since this movie franchise is technically dying, or pretty much dead at this point, because James Gunn was hired to rewrite the entire DC universe and this movie was suppose to be the end of the current DC universe, I knew not much effort was going to go into making this a top tier superhero movie. The CGI for the majority of the film was solid, although at some intense and somewhat important moments, the creatures, people and background can look poorly edited. The cinematography, however, in my opinion, was very pleasing. The over shots of the landscapes were pretty well done.
Although I was right about the overall movie being mediocre, there is one thing I can say I thoroughly enjoyed and that was the action scenes, focusing more on the fight scenes to be specific. Besides the ending to one of the fight scenes all of them, I felt, were shot very well, performed very well and just all around great. At least big stunts and fight scenes are getting enough attention to keep getting better and look more and more real.
