Aquaman (2018) Review: A Dazzling, Dumb Undersea Blockbuster

🦸 This review is part of the The Old DCEU – Every Film Reviewed – watch every DCEU film from Man of Steel to the finale (2013–2023).

Aquaman arrived in December 2018 with a very specific brief: make Jason Momoa the lead of a superhero franchise, and make people care about a hero who talks to fish. Director James Wan’s response was to ignore the second challenge entirely. He didn’t make people care about the premise. He made people care about the spectacle — and then positioned Momoa so centrally in it that the spectacle became the point.

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Aquaman (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

The HDR transfer on the 4K version makes the bioluminescent underwater sequences genuinely spectacular. The correct format.

The result is the DCEU’s most visually distinctive film. Wan builds Atlantis not as a sunken city with an undulating blue filter over it, but as a fully realized civilization with distinct kingdoms, biological fauna of every scale, and a visual language that borrows from science fiction, fantasy epic, and the kind of bright, maximalist blockbuster filmmaking that hasn’t been fashionable since the 1980s. It is gorgeous, occasionally ridiculous, and committed to its own logic with an absolutism that’s genuinely infectious.

Jason Momoa is the film’s foundation. His Arthur Curry is not the blond, clean-cut aquaman of Silver Age comics — he’s a bar-brawling, heavy-metal listening, genuinely funny half-Atlantean who has spent his whole life being told he doesn’t belong in either world. Momoa plays him with a specific physical ease that makes the character’s confidence feel earned rather than arrogant. He’s charming in a way that several MCU leads are not: his charm costs him nothing, it’s not performed, it’s just who he is.

The film’s plot is functional rather than sophisticated: Arthur must claim the magical Trident of Atlan to become the rightful King of Atlantis before his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson, having enormous fun as the film’s villain) can unite the undersea kingdoms against the surface world. It’s a hero’s journey in the most classical sense — exile, return, test, claim. The script does not subvert this structure. It executes it competently enough that the spectacle has something to hang on.

Narrative Architecture: King Arthur, Underwater

The film’s narrative intelligence shows in how it handles Arthur’s identity conflict. He’s not a superhero who pretends to be human while secretly being royal — he’s genuinely ambivalent about both identities. Atlantis rejected his mother and he’s never felt a duty to serve a kingdom that considered his existence shameful. Surface-world humanity treats the ocean as a dump. He has plenty of reasons not to care about either side of the conflict Orm is engineering. The film earns his eventual commitment to kingship by working through this ambivalence rather than dismissing it.

Mera (Amber Heard) is the film’s most underrated element. She’s an Atlantean warrior-princess who can control water, has no patience for Arthur’s reluctance, and is responsible for the film’s most consistently entertaining chemistry. Their dynamic — her absolute conviction that he should step up, his instinct to deflect everything with a joke — is more interesting than a straightforward romance, and the Italy sequence, where they’re stranded on the surface searching for an ancient temple, is the film at its most purely enjoyable.

Patrick Wilson’s Orm is the film’s most interesting underrated element. He’s wrong in his methods but not in his diagnosis: surface humans have been dumping toxins, trash, and chemical runoff into the ocean for centuries. His war with the surface world is terrorism, but the grievance that drives it is real. Wilson plays him as a man of genuine conviction rather than power-hunger, and his final scene — in which he is given a choice about his own future — is more nuanced than most DCEU villain resolutions allow.

The World James Wan Built

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Aquaman DC Multiverse Figure (opens in a new tab)

Momoa's Aquaman in his orange and green comic-accurate suit from the final act. Well-detailed collectible.

The film’s genuine achievement is the Atlantean world itself. Wan and production designer Bill Brzeski built an underwater civilization with internal logic and visual variety that no previous underwater blockbuster had managed. The Brine Kingdom is all coral and crustacean biology. The Trench is horror — pale, eyeless creatures that swarm like insects and swallow entire ships. The Hidden Sea is a lost prehistoric world with an entirely different ecosystem. Each kingdom has its own aesthetic and its own visual rules.

The Trench sequence deserves specific mention. About ninety minutes into what is otherwise a family-accessible adventure film, Wan suddenly pivots to full horror-movie mode: Arthur and Mera descend into the deepest, darkest part of the ocean and are surrounded by hundreds of Trench creatures — pale, shrieking, tooth-filled things — in a sequence that has genuinely terrified children in cinemas worldwide. It is tonally jarring and entirely worth it. Wan couldn’t help himself, and the film is better for it.

Three technical achievements stand out:

1. The underwater visual language: Wan and cinematographer Don Burgess developed a specific approach to depicting movement underwater — character hair and fabric move with the resistance of water without ever looking like green-screen weightlessness.
2. The scale of the final battle: Hundreds of thousands of CG creatures, riders, and warriors from six different undersea kingdoms converging on a single point. The logistics of this sequence are staggering.
3. The creature design: From the seahorse cavalry to the Karathen (a monster the size of a skyscraper) to the Trench swarm, the biological imagination on display is the film’s most consistent achievement.

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Aquaman (Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

Still visually strong in HD. Great family film for a home cinema night.

Is Aquaman (2018) worth watching?

Yes — calibrate expectations appropriately. It is a maximalist spectacle blockbuster, not a character study. Jason Momoa is great, the world is visually impressive, and it is genuinely fun. Don’t expect complexity and you’ll enjoy it.

Who directed Aquaman (2018)?

James Wan, known for horror franchises (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring). His horror director’s instincts show in the Trench sequence — and his visual ambition gives the film’s world-building real scale.

Is Aquaman suitable for kids?

PG-13, and generally family-accessible. The Trench sequence is genuinely intense — pale screaming creatures swarming in darkness — and may frighten younger children. Otherwise it’s an adventure film with comic-book violence. Fine for most 8-year-olds with a parent.

How does Aquaman (2018) connect to the DCEU?

Arthur Curry appears in Justice League (2017) before this solo film. Aquaman is set after the events of Justice League and is largely self-contained — you can watch it with minimal DCEU background.

Does Aquaman have a sequel?

Yes — Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) is the direct sequel and the final film of the old DCEU. It continues Arthur’s story as king of Atlantis.