Aquaman [film]
Entry updated 26 October 2026. Tagged: Film.
US film (2018). Warner Brothers Pictures. Directed by James Wan. Written by Will Beall, Geoff Johns, and Wan (story); Beall and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (screenplay), based on the character created by Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger. Cast includes Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Julie Andrews, Willem Dafoe, Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman, Dolph Lundgren, Jason Momoa, Temuera Morrison, and Patrick Wilson. 143 minutes; colour.
The opening scenes convey the classic origin story of Aquaman, as a princess from the sunken city of Atlantis, Atlanna (Kidman), flees to avoid an unwanted marriage and meets and bonds with lighthouse-keeper Tom Curry (Morrison). After their son Arthur Curry is born, Atlanna is forcibly taken back to Atlantis, leaving Tom Curry to raise the boy alone, though he also receives instruction from the Atlantean Vulko (Dafoe). As an adult, Aquaman masters his aquatic Superpowers and has his first encounters with his two must enduring foes: the villainous Black Manta (Abdul-Mateen II), who hates Aquaman because the Superhero allowed his pirate father to die, and his half-brother Orm (Wilson), the new king of Atlantis who wishes to rule the world as the Ocean Master. He also meets his future wife, the Atlantean Mera (Heard), who urges Aquaman to oppose Orm, and is advised by Vulko to obtain the Trident of Atlan, which would make him Atlantis's new ruler. After finding clues to its whereabouts in an Italian city, Aquaman and Mera then have to confront the undersea Monster Karathen (voice Andrews) and, after getting the Trident from her and gaining new powers, they go on to defeat Orm. A closing scene sets the stage for a sequel featuring another battle with Black Manta, which duly arrived five years later as Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023).
This film was hugely successful, as audiences endured its obligatory mayhem to enjoy glimpses of novel and imaginatively rendered environments Under the Sea and their variegated inhabitants, and got to know and appreciate its revised version of the venerable superhero as a rough-hewn but good-hearted fighter for justice with a fondness for alcohol. The superhero is also interestingly portrayed as torn between his two homelands, the surface world that he grew up in and the underwater world that is his heritage, and he becomes a crusader for peace between those two disparate realms. There is an understated message about how humans have damagingly polluted our oceans, and the film hearteningly refuses to make Orm a despicable Supervillain like Black Manta, instead characterizing him as a misguided man with the potential to be redeemed. These virtues allowed the film's numerous lapses in logic to go unnoticed, except by attentive reviewers. [GW]
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