Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom arrives as the fifteenth and terminal installment of a cinematic universe that spent a decade learning to walk and then immediately sat down. James Wan, a director of genuine visual appetite, has elected to make a buddy comedy about two estranged half-brothers bickering across a series of underwater kingdoms, which is a defensible choice and also the only choice available to a franchise that has run out of throne rooms. The plot concerns a cursed trident, a vengeful pirate, and a stolen child, arranged in the order of least resistance.

The cast is notably polyglot, drawing on Native Hawaiian, Black, Korean American, Maori, and trans performers, though the film never pauses to congratulate itself about this, which is its quietest virtue. The environmental material is more insistent. Orichalcum, a fuel that belches greenhouse gases, threatens to overheat the planet, and the picture ends with Arthur addressing the United Nations to propose that Atlantis join as a member state. That is a closing argument delivered with a straight face, and the film does not entirely earn it.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. Mera is injured early and spends most of the runtime recovering, leaving the emotional architecture to the male leads and their grudges. There is no engagement with racial identity, no queer content despite the casting, no critique of the pirate haven's economics, no body politics, no neurodivergence, and the mythology is invented rather than excavated from history. What remains is a competent, expensive, faintly exhausted adventure that lectures gently about the oceans and then gets back to the jokes.