The Aquaman review

Just got back from finally seeing Aquaman.  I feel like a 15 year old for using this description, but it's pretty awesome.  And mainly, I'm talking visually.

It's not just the pretty, trippy luminosity of much of the underwater settings (the semi-alien glowiness in some parts reminded a bit of Avatar, actually), but the incredible amount of creativity in creature, costume and vehicle design.   A lot of it, I thought, had a sort of hallucinatory intensity about it: but I presume you wouldn't want to watch it under the effects of LSD, given some of the creepy creatures.  (Or maybe a hallucinogen cancels it out, and you end up thinking you're watching a black and white episode of Sea Hunt?)  

Anyway, apart from it being just continuously, eye-bogglingly visually impressive, I thought the direction was pretty good too.  I know that all heavy CGI movies let the camera (real or virtual) move around a lot, but I thought this one really embraced the idea that filming an underwater world is equivalent to filming in space - freed of gravity, you can visually zoom around anything in all directions, and it often does.  

The story was fit for purpose, and moved along at considerable pace despite the length of the movie.  It was just witty enough, I think, although given my strong preference for superhero movies to be outright funny, a couple of more good, unexpected jokes wouldn't have hurt.

So, pretty good overall, and led me to have a post viewing conversation with my son about why I prefer this to, say, Batman in any incarnation, or Lord of the Rings.  Because, I said, Aquaman felt more realistic than either of those.

You can imagine what kind of virtual spit-take that got, so I had to rush on to explain:  "realism" has to be taken in the context of what the movie is selling.  So, for Wonder Woman or Aquaman, it's a given, from the start of the film, that the hero comes from a world where some Greek myths, and the superpowers they involve, are real.   So, you just accept that and have to view the "realism" of the rest of the story through that prism.   

Batman, on the other hand, seems intended to be so close to the real world, this becomes part of the problem for me.  by setting it in something too close to reality, the whole troubled, orphaned, ridiculously costumed vigilante who doesn't actually kill and chases villains who dress up just because they can has never felt like a scenario of which I can ignore the silliness.  

OK, what about Spiderman? I hear someone say.   Yeah, well, perhaps it's the lighter touch of this character and his scenario that means I can ignore the stupid physics and find his universe is more real than that of Gotham City.       

As for Lord of the Rings - look, I simply feel no affinity for that style of fantasy.  And visually in the movies, I've always thought it looked blown out of proportion to fit modern sensibilities and that has bothered me too.  And the setting was just not that interesting for me. 

So yeah, that's how I defend talking about "realism" in justifying what superhero movies I like or dislike.

And finally:   Nicole Kidman's gold fish consumption in the film reminded me - I had just read an article in The Atlantic that detailed a college fad for goldfish eating in the USA that started in 1939!:

It started out with one. One live goldfish, swallowed up by a Harvard freshman on a dare. Three weeks later it rose to three, and four days after that it jumped to 24. By the end of April 1939, the record for the number of goldfish swallowed stood at 101. Students at colleges across the country -- the University of Michigan, Boston College, New Mexico State, among others -- had popularized a quest to see how many goldfish a single person could eat in one sitting.

I had no idea that young Americans in that momentous year would be into such an icky, silly stunt.   Read the whole article, it's well worth it.