Aquaman (James Wan, 2018)
Cast: Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Dolph Lundgren, Yahya Abdul-Mateen, Temuera Morrison, Ludi Lin, Michael Beach, Randall Park. Screenplay: David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Will Beall, Geoff Johns, James Wan. Cinematography: Don Burgess. Production design: Bill Brzeski. Film editing: Kirk M. Morri. Music: Rupert Gregson-Williams.
I sometimes feel with the comic-book-sourced superhero movie that we have moved not just into a separate genre but into an entirely separate medium: a fusion of video games, technology, and neo-mythology that's something other than traditional cinematic storytelling. Any auteur-theory criteria that we might apply to the movies we knew and loved are irrelevant when the number of credited people who worked on a film runs into the thousands. Aquaman is an artifact, meant to have its two-and-a-half hours experienced in the most technologically advanced venue possible, as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk -- wouldn't Richard Wagner have been happy to have CGI and Dolby sound and Imax and 3-D for his Ring? From time to time we glimpse remnants of the old conventional cinema in Aquaman: engaging performers like Jason Momoa and Willem Dafoe and Nicole Kidman (who seems to be everywhere -- when does the woman sleep?). But their puny human efforts are swamped by the technology, so much so that we hardly care about their characters when computer-generated things are zooming and whizzing in every direction. Sometimes the humans are taken over physically by the computer, which makes them look younger (Dafoe) or brawnier (Momoa) than they are in reality. Which is all just to say that I enjoyed Aquaman as whatever it is, but I kind of hated it as a movie.