Aquaman & The Lost Kingdom Review: 3 Ups & 7 Downs
3. The TERRIBLE Editing
Even if you haven't been following this movie's extremely bumpy post-production process, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this thing has been put through the studio mangle.
Right from its choppy, jumbled first act, it's painfully obvious that the final cut has been Frankensteined together from a variety of different test-screened cuts.
What were presumably full scenes are boiled down to unfussed montages set to voiceover narration intended to get exposition across as quickly as possible, and characters regularly appear and disappear out of the story on a random whim.
There's one especially risible editorial fumble at the end of the second act, when Arthur attends to a distressing personal situation and it's hilariously obvious that the studio just had the guts of the scene ripped out.
Instead, the scene suddenly ends with Arthur screaming in slow-motion before a jarring cut to black. This surely wasn't how James Wan intended things to go.
It's evident that Wan and Warner Bros. struggled to shape their footage into anything beyond a most basically coherent assembly, in turn making the first film seem positively well-crafted by comparison.