Rob Cram

NO SPOILER REVIEW: I watched this at the 02 Cineworld London with Screen X yesterday (Dec 13th) for context. This is a decent movie set before and after the events of Aquaman's appearance in Justice League. It's quite a long film and slow paced at times with a number of head scratching oddities and a mish-mash of side-plots. However, it contains a lot of mixed styles making it part comedy, part action, part sci-fi and a splash of love story - central theme seems to be around "family", take note of that. It's certainly not as dark themed as some other DC movies. I'd even go as far as suggesting this is a much more family friendly affair. Jason Momoa comes into his own here somewhat perfectly cast and very appealing to the females in the audience for obvious reasons. Men can savour Amber Heard who wears revealing clothes as a contrast and performs like a decent side-kick. I did get "The Jewel of the Nile" (circa 1985) vibes from the interaction between the two at times. James Wan does a great job of directing, but be prepared for a lot of CGI trickery most notably on the characters and aquatic life as you would expect. The movie features great visual moments on occasion, in fact epic at times but some of the shots from Wan come across like a L'Oreal advert for shampoo (no I am not joking or exaggerating). Still, this is an interesting "good time" film, not deep on plot and fairly predictable. Not the most thought provoking of superhero films, but also not afraid to just entertain for the sake of it. Yes, Aquaman is worth seeing on the big screen, and Screen X works well with this movie but still misses on some of the sweeping vistas which would have worked really well which is a shame. The film overall is not a "must see" though in my view and I would rate fairly average at best but good for non-taxing entertainment purposes. 6/10