So look, I get it. Losing Chadwick Boseman really blew up what this movie was going to be, and gave them a hard task. And I think they did a good job dealing with Boseman’s too-soon death. But the rest of the movie… not so much.

The fundamental problem is that they’re trying to simultaneously set up Namor and his not-Atlanteans as being a sympathetic Wakanda-like country, while also needing them to be the unambiguous villains of the movie. How do you do that? By making sure that the relevant characters never have a chance to just sit down and talk things out, but instead only interact with each other via threats and ultimatums for no goddamn reason.

It is clear throughout this movie that the Wakandans and the Na’vi have interests that aren’t perfectly aligned, but are close enough to make a negotiated alliance very possible, borderline easy, and the only thing preventing them from making it happen is that they’re ruled by hot-headed, impulsive monarchs who act in self-defeating ways.

And so in the end — this is barely even a spoiler — we end up with the obvious alliance that was possible all along, except that instead of having had a couple of tedious weeks hammering out the details in a conference room, we’ve had billions of dollars of destruction and probably thousands of lives lost.

But hey, without that, how could we have crammed in the tedious, CG-laden battles that are the regrettable hallmark of the MCU? (I managed to stay awake through the big loud completely-uninteresting climactic battle, but it was a near thing.) It’s really remarkable to me that Disney has a trillion dollars to spend on these movies, clearly has heard the criticisms of their formulaic, dull battles, but they’re just doing nothing to fix the problem.

Beyond all that, I just didn’t buy the incredible deadliness of the not-Atlanteans. Sure, they have vibranium, but unlike Wakanda, they’re not a technological powerhouse, they just have like… whales and shit. Their whole civilization doesn’t really make any sense, and the more the movie focused on their society, the worse it was.

Bad world-building, a classic idiot plot, frustrating characters, lousy action scenes… it all adds up to a bad movie. I haven’t quite been able to convince myself to quit watching MCU movies, but with this one in the rear-view mirror and a goddamn Ant-Man movie next up, maybe I can finally let it go.