Aquaman & The Lost Kingdom Review: 3 Ups & 7 Downs

6. The Painfully Generic Plot

Much as it's fashionable to say that unimaginative, soulless scripts feel like they were written by AI these days, in the case of the new Aquaman it's absolutely true.

From top to bottom, the screenplay feels like it scanned all the comic book movies from the past 25 years and just slapped a "new" label on the amalgamated end result.

From Arthur (Jason Momoa) dealing with fatherhood to the political hand-wringing about Atlantis revealing itself to the surface world, the buddy dynamic between Arthur and his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), and basically everything about the villains' plan, it all feels so lazy and played-out.

To make matters worse, the screenplay is packed to the gills (sorry) with nonsense exposition, and even its well-intended environmentalist messaging comes off as corny and ham-handed.

It is an aggressively stale piece of superhero storytelling and, coming at the end of a year defined by so many mediocre comic book films, is unlikely to entertain much patience or forgiveness from audiences.