So the hope here was that this would be a silly fun movie in the vein of Birds of Prey, maybe a sort of replacement-level MCU equivalent. But in fact, this movie is just dire, and terrible in most ways.

But so to start out with the ways it’s not terrible: It isn’t doing the portentous grimdark bullshit of Snyder-driven DCU movies. It’s bright and colorful and the characters crack jokes.

Okay, that’s the end of the good stuff. Because from there on, it’s just phenomenally derivative. Like, I’m not saying that a generic superhero movie should be some innovative work of genius, but this one is so imitative that you can practically see the footnotes. View of a colorful, brightly-lit techno city with a Daft Punk-esque soundtrack? Ah, that’s lifted from Tron: Legacy. Kaiju fighting? Totally Godzilla. The scene where they have to put a steamwork brass cylinder into a machine with gears and markings and then put water on it to activate it at which point it turns on and then reveals the next cutscene? Tomb Raider. The part where H.R. Gigeresque underwater creatures are swarming them? Aliens. The final scene where he gives a voiceover monologue about himself and the growth he underwent over the course of the movie, and ends with “I am… Aquaman”? Literally almost plagiarism from the end of the original Spider-Man movie.

It’s a globe-trotting hot mess of a plot with villains that don’t matter, massive infodumps of convenient nonsense, characters whose motivations seem borderline nonsensical, and a hero who mostly just seems to be following along on the ride, and it’s not made with enough wit and craft to make you forgive it any of that.

So a weird thing for me with MCU movies is that when I see them, I by and large like them; but because there are so many of them and they share their similarities, I tend to just think of them as generic action blockbusters later on. But these DCU movies are reminding me of what generic action blockbusters really are like. There might be an MCU movie or two that’s worse than this one (Thor 2? Hulk?), but this is still one of the better DCU entries (definitely below Wonder Woman and Birds of Prey, and tbh probably worse than WW84, but obviously above anything Batman and/or Superman-related). So props to Disney, but meanwhile, don’t bother watching this.