Aquaman is a tidal wave of unapologetic underwater delirium

Early on in Aquaman, Queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) muses about how, under the sea, no one can see you cry, as the water carries the tears away. Just as stoically, her partner, Thomas Curry (Temuera Morrison), tells her that no such escape exists on land. The exchange immediately establishes the tone of the latest DC Comics adaptation, as it launches into a series of spectacles that each outdo and out-cheese the last.

The movie has everything: giant seahorses, lasers, de-aged Willem Dafoe, a Lisa Frank color scheme, more lasers, an Indiana Jones temple raid, Julie Andrews, an octopus playing the drums, even more lasers, and my undivided attention for two and a half hours. Every second is overflowing — and thank goodness for that.

A beaming sense of fun is a through-line for director James Wan, who has become the go-to guy in Hollywood for bringing franchise-ready worlds to life (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) or giving tired ones an extra boost (Furious 7). His previous work seems to have earned him carte blanche in the DC sandbox — Aquaman reaches big-budget heights (and depths) that only filmmakers like Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy director Gore Verbinski and the Wachowski sisters have had the cred to pull off.

[Ed. note: This review contains mild spoilers for Aquaman.]

In telling the story of Arthur Curry’s (Jason Momoa) struggle to accept and then claim his birthright as king of the underwater city of Atlantis, Wan eschews any sense of self-seriousness in favor of delirious delights that take the form of vehicles, locations and, most of all, creatures. Aquaman is a film that’s silly by nature — true to the comics, Arthur’s defining power is talking to fish — and Wan leans fully into the aesthetic. Every dripping-wet look that Arthur shoots a character is accompanied by a guitar lick. There are more hair flips here than in a shampoo commercial. Most of the film’s central romance (with Amber Heard’s Mera) is played in a montage that could double as tourism board videos for a vacation hotspot.

Being the son of an Atlantean Queen and a human man, Arthur is saddled with your typical heroic baggage. The people of Atlantis don’t really want him back (they call him a “half-breed” and a “mongrel”), and he doesn’t want to lord it over them, either, as he blames them for the death of his mother, who was forced to return to honor her arranged marriage and then offered up as a sacrifice to the deep sea trench.

However, as his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson, a staple of Wan’s films) prepares to lead Atlantis in all-out war against the surface world in revenge for years and years of pollution, giving up on his heritage is no longer an option for Arthur. Luckily, Jason Momoa is more than up to the task of being a leading man — and, more importantly, selling a feature-length version of the “MY MAN” rowdiness that was immediately telegraphed by Aquaman’s very vocal appearance in Justice League.

Love them or hate them, DC movies have shown off an undeniable sense of ambition, embracing the sheer sense of scale offered by film as a medium. Aquaman is no exception to the rule; it’s just that it’s on the opposite side of the spectrum when it comes to literal and figurative light. As far as comparable properties go, Aquaman has more in common with Super Sentai (in any iteration) or the epics of Chinese director Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers, The Great Wall) than any other recent DC film — even Wonder Woman.

That epic quality extends beyond the creatures that populate the oceans. Part of Arthur’s journey involves diving into Atlantean history and mythology, and each discovery — from the Deserters’ sandy remains hidden beneath the Sahara desert to flashbacks to Atlantis’ steampunk past — provides a glimpse of a lavishly detailed world that could easily anchor its own entire movie.

That the film doesn’t have too much to offer beyond spectacle hardly matters when the spectacle is this good. With each set-piece outdoing the last, Wan neatly zips past the fatigue that most superhero films succumb to in their finales, pulling out every shimmering stop so that the great clash of armies that ends the film — following the unspoken mandate that every new thing we see must be bigger, bigger, bigger than the last — feels like a surprise rather than an inevitability. Crab people, trained sharks, Space Invaders battle formations, the Earth’s core splitting to reveal a giant monster — it’s all a joy to behold.

Every character — including Arthur — is sketched with broad lines and performances that reach for that golden-age-of-Hollywood whimsy but amount to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. They can’t quite save the cliche-ridden script (Arthur is “the bridge between land and sea,” which is not how bridges work, the last time I checked), but the big swings match the surroundings, with Wilson delivering a performance that’s Rita Repulsa-adjacent in the best way possible: half deadly serious monologue and half full-throat vowel shouting.

Alongside the ludicrousness of Venom and the pop brilliance of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018 marks a significant turning point when it comes to superhero films. They’re finally breaking from the gritty realism of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and the grimdark that defined DC’s Zack Snyder years, in favor of a brightness more readily brought to mind by comics’ Silver Age. Even the more minor arcs of Aquaman — Dafoe as Vulko, Arthur’s mentor; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Manta, out for revenge; Randall Park as Stephen Shin, a marine biologist convinced of Atlantis’ existence despite the ridicule of his colleagues — amp up the melodrama, coming off as fun rather than filler.

Add in Rupert Gregson-Williams’ score, which swings from Tron-like electro-pop to more traditional full-orchestra arrangements, and were it not for Black Panther and Into the Spider-Verse, Aquaman would easily clinch the title for best superhero movie of the year. Its unapologetic ridiculousness is exactly why it’s so delightful, bucking so many of the rules set for the genre in the last decade. If it finds success, it’s easy to imagine Aquaman ushering in a new wave of these films.