Not Your Father’s Aquaman

by Michael Isenberg.

Aquaman has long been the Rodney Dangerfield of the DC universe. He gets no respect. Born to the Queen of Atlantis, saddled with the very un-superhero-like name of “Arthur,” and raised by his human lighthouse keeper father, the goofy-looking Marine Marvel is the butt of numerous “You’re more useless than Aquaman” jokes on Family Guy, the gist of which is that the power to get fish to do stuff has little practical value.

Then in 2016, in the otherwise disastrous Batman v. Superman, we got a brief glimpse of a different Aquaman. Played by Jason Momoa (known to Game of Throne fans for his role as Khal Drogo), this buff, bearded version of the Dweller-in-the-Depths looked kind of rad.

We saw more of him last year in Justice League and discovered he’s hard-drinking and has a sense of humor. “Dress like a bat. You’re out of your mind, Bruce Wayne.” Kind of an aquatic Wolverine.

But it wasn’t until a scene early in the new Aquaman movie, which opens today across the nation, that I was truly convinced: this is not your father’s Aquaman.

It’s a fight scene, Aquaman against the father-and-son pirate team of Jesse and David Kane, aka Manta. The Kanes are attempting to steal a Russian submarine. They’ve killed the captain and many of the crew; the survivors are holed up in the torpedo room, neutralized. Aquaman bursts through a hatch, and after a quip (“Permission to come aboard”) proceeds to take the Kanes and their henchmen apart. The action ends with the crew safely evacuated and Daddy Kane trapped under a missile as water floods the compartment. “Wait!” Manta yells to Aquaman. “You can’t leave him here. Help me! Please!”

We’ve seen the scenario a million times, and the hero always rescues the trapped villain, who really doesn’t deserve it. But not this time. “Ask the sea for mercy,” Aquaman tells him. And then he leaves.

Totally. Bad. Ass.

The theft of the submarine is just the first step in a scheme by Aquaman’s half-brother, Orm, monarch of one of the seven Atlantean kingdoms. I wasn’t really sure which one; the politics of Atlantis are intricate and confusing. A clunky exposition scene tries to explain it all, but it doesn’t help much. I was reminded of the Star Wars prequels’ debates over the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems. I’m not even sure if there really are seven kingdoms. I think some are extinct. Anyway, Orm plans to use the submarine in a false flag attack to unite however many kingdoms there are for a war against the surface dwellers. Because pollution of the oceans or something. Fortunately for him, Aquaman just abandons the still-functioning submarine after he defeats the pirates. The Russian Navy, inexplicably, makes no attempt to salvage it, thereby allowing Orm to just take it and make the movie happen.

In any case, not all Atlanteans are arming for war. The beautiful redhead Mera, daughter of the King of…one of the kingdoms, seeks out Aquaman and accosts him with a Call to Adventure: she begs him to come to Atlantis, challenge his brother for the throne, and thereby stop the war. True to the Hero’s Journey, Aquaman initially refuses. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But events conspire against him and before long he is under the sea, threatening Orm with an “ass-whooping.”

DC movies since 2005’s Batman Begins have a reputation for being grim. It even inspired a joke in rival Marvel’s Deadpool 2, in which Deadpool says to the straitlaced Cable, “You're so dark. Are you sure you're not from the DC universe?” But Aquaman has a different feel to it. Part of it is that, starting with last year’s Wonder Woman, DC is finally putting humor into its movies. For example, in one scene, Mera impulsively jumps out of an airplane—without a parachute. Seeing the shocked look of the pilot, Aquaman says, “Redheads, you gotta love them.”

But it’s not just the one-liners. Aquaman has a very different visual feel from previous entries in the DC Extended Universe. Instead of the grimy, hyper-realistic, claustrophobic urban setting of Gotham, we’re out in the open, in the vast spaces on the ocean surface—and beneath. The colors are bright. We even spend some time in a cheerful Mediterranean seaside village. The underwater CGI seascapes really dazzle.

But sadly, despite a very likable and kick-ass Aquaman, some funny one-liners, and stunning visuals, this movie isn’t that great. It's not terrible, there's no "Martha" moment. Just not great. The problem is the script. It just fails to sparkle in so many ways. I already mentioned the ponderous exposition and the plot hole concerning the submarine. The dialog is not up to par. What’s supposed to pass as witty, romantically-charged banter between Aquaman and Mera frequently falls flat. And once it is set into motion, the plot is entirely predictable. There is only one twist to speak of, and I saw it coming a mile away. I even knew exactly what the last scene was going to be long before the end.

Still, I hope Aquaman does well at the box office. Now that Jason Momoa has given the character a much-needed makeover, I’m eager to see him back in a better movie.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

The Magnificent Six

Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Regular readers of this blog already know that the Peter Parker we all know and love is not the only Spider-man. Through the years, many others have worn the mask. Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, opening in theaters today, asks “What if a half dozen of these web-slingers joined forces?”

The pretext for this team up, in classic comic book fashion, is a lab experiment gone wrong. Wilson Fisk—the Kingpin—has lost his wife Vanessa and their son Richard in a car accident which he had some responsibility for. Desperate to see them one more time, the grieving Fisk builds a “supercollider” to open portals between dimensions in the hopes of finding their counterparts in parallel universes. But it’s a dangerous machine—every time he operates it, earthquakes shake New York; if he continues, the whole city is likely to collapse.

Determined to stop the Kingpin is the Spider-man from this universe, Miles Morales, a Banksy wanna-be whose 2011 comic book debut was controversial because of his Afro-Caribbean-American ancestry. As Nerds who Read Contributing Reviewer Kerey McKenna pointed out, much of the controversy came from culture warriors who never read a comic book. Miles just wants to fit in at his straitlaced new school—a magnet school for the gifted—develop his artistic talent, and not be embarrassed by his cop dad. He never asked to be bitten by a glowing spider—I think it was robotic—and bear the great power—and great responsibility—of a super-hero.

Miles is joined by five other Spider-men Spider-persons Spider-creatures who were sucked through the interdimensional portals:

An older Peter Parker, Peter B. Parker, sadder, but not yet wiser,

Gwen Stacy (Spider-Gwen), the new girl in school, the only one of Miles’s classmates to appreciate his humor,

from the 1930s, the hard-boiled Spider-man Noir (voiced by Nicolas Cage, BTW),

the anime cutie, Peni Parker,

and strangest of all, Peter Porker, aka Spider-ham, who first appeared in 1983’s Marvel Tails alongside Hulk Bunny, Goose Rider, and Captain Americat. Yes, there was a spider-pig decades before Homer Simpson got pig tracks on the ceiling.

Together they must defeat the Kingpin while completing the seemingly conflicting tasks of getting everyone back to their own corners of the multiverse and shutting down the supercollider for good.

The artistic team combined multiple animation styles appropriate to the various characters. Then they added the handmade, colorful graffiti style of Miles’s urban neighborhood to the mix. The combined effect is visually stunning.

The movie delivers plenty of the trademark humor and one-liners we’ve come to expect from Marvel Studios. As with last year’s Lego Batman Movie, all the characters’ past incarnations are “real,” even when they’re an embarrassment.

We don’t talk about this.

And channeling Deadpool 2, there’s an end credits scene worth waiting for in which Spider-man travels back in time to confront one of those earlier incarnations.

It isn’t all fun and games, however. When I saw it, a solemn hush fell over the theater during the Stan Lee cameo, the first since his death last month. Very sad.

Much as I like this movie, I have to concede it drags in places. The special effects of the supercollider are overdone and go on too long. Because it doubles as an origin story for Miles Morales, this Spider-man movie takes a while to start Spider-manning. And it faces the same problem as Suicide Squad in that it needs to introduce a large number of characters that most of the public (unlike fans of Nerds who Read) aren’t familiar with.

As is often the case with ensemble casts, some of the characters get short shrift. I would have liked to see more of Spider-man Noir, thanks to Kerey’s recent review of that character. Peni Parker, sadly, gets hardly any screen time at all. And Kingpin does little more than show up, look menacing, and sometimes beat people to death. The Vanessa/Richard back story is told in a very brief flashback. This is quite a contrast to Netflix’s Daredevil, where the complexity of his character, especially his seemingly out-of-character devotion to Vanessa, is the dramatic linchpin of the series. I would have liked to see that developed in Into the Spider-verse as well.

Still, it says something that my biggest complaint about a movie is I didn’t get enough of some things. Overall, Into the Spider-verse is immensely funny and hugely entertaining, in my opinion the best movie of the Christmas season (so far, at least). Go see it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Urb-ivores

The Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve. Audiobooks narrated by Barnaby Edwards.
Book review by Kerey McKenna.

“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”

It starts with one of the most intriguing opening lines in science fiction fantasy. The Predator Cities Series—also called The Mortal Engines Quartet after the first book—is a saga that always seems in motion with grand oversized set pieces.

The world of the Mortal Engines is a bizarre post-apocalypse filled with high swashbuckling adventure. Millennia after futuristic doomsday weapons unleashed massive cataclysms on the Earth in “The 60 Minute War,” the remnants of humanity occupy a mere fraction of their former territory. China and North America are still radioactive wastelands, oceans have risen and fallen, and the earth shakes with new seismic activity. One way communities of survivors adapted to this new hostile planet was to become mobile. Using salvaged technology, cities that survived the initial Armageddon were jury-rigged into giant vehicles. Not just vehicles that are the size of cities, but vehicles with salvaged monuments, buildings, and streets that give these cities continuity with their pre-war progenitors. For example the first and oldest mobile city, London, is topped with the iconic Saint Paul’s Cathedral. These mobile or “traction cities” trundle along land on giant caterpillar treads, skate across the thick arctic ice, or float on the oceans. However some towns turned predatory. Not content to gather and cultivate resources where they could be found, large cities like Paris, Arkangel, and London took to gobbling up smaller, weaker cities and towns, chasing them down to claim their resources, technology, and people. And the towns are quite literally gobbled up, through large mechanical “jaws” that scoop them up into a salvage yard. As the system mimics many biological phenomena, the thinkers of the great predatory cities dub this system “Municipal Darwinism” and claim that this “city eat city world” is the “great game of civilizations” distilled to its most logical and noble form.

However, to paraphrase another great tribal leader who once resided in ancient London, “The problem with gobbling up other peoples’ cities is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ cities.” With prey running short, the great predator City of London turns its hungry eyes to the Static Cities of Central Asia, a civilization of non-mobile settlements long thought safe from the predator cities due to geography and massive fortifications.

Tom Natsworthy, an awkward orphan boy of fifteen in London’s historians’ guild (who might as well have a neon sign above him blinking “Due for a Hero’s Journey”) unwittingly gets in the way of London’s machinations to reach more prey. After Tom “sees too much,” he is cast out of the mobile city of London and into the wilderness and must survive with the mysterious Hester Shaw, a girl about his age, with a disfigured face and a vendetta against one of London’s most prominent citizens. Together, Tom, Hester, and other youths in London will discover London’s plans to break into the untapped frontier of Asia and how London’s hunger could bring new disasters to the planet. In the first book, the heroes— and the reader—will meet scoundrels, scavengers, spies, and ancient cyborg super soldiers and will travel through the mobile city of London with its literally vertical society, dangerous wildernesses where pirate suburbs roam, and the amazing floating city of Air Haven.

The Mortal Engines Quartet (Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices, and A Darkling Plain—a fifth book, Night Flights contains three short stories) are compelling adventures through a bizarre post-apocalypse, written for a young adult audience but certainly enjoyable for almost anyone. I say written for a young adult audience because of the ages of the principal protagonists in the first two books (and a good portion of the protagonists in the ensemble casts of the third and final installments), and the third person near-omniscient narration that can make the elaborate agendas and conflicts of the latter half of the quartet a lot easier to follow.

Mortal Engines is also another young adult sci-fi fantasy series that the Hollywood machine has gobbled up in hopes of making a multi-media franchise, with the first installment landing in cinemas this weekend.

I had read the first book in the series some time ago but with the movie coming out I wanted to catch up so I downloaded the audio adaptations, all narrated by Barnaby Edwards. Revisiting and catching up to the series, I was pleasantly surprised to see that while I could understand why Hollywood would bet on this as the next big YA blockbuster adaptation, the books themselves won’t lend themselves to being as predictable or bound to a formula as other YA franchises. There is no magical school that the characters must return to every year or singular villain behind every unfortunate event that befalls the heroes. Like one of the bonkers roving cities, the quartet stacks up machinations and history into a contraption that is always moving.

I haven’t seen the film adaptation, but the prospect that they have translated the spirit of the books and realized some of the grand characters and set pieces of this world makes me eager to catch the movie when it rolls into town.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.