AQUAMAN (2006)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

I don't know which of the many reboots of the AQUAMAN comics-franchise influenced this unsuccessful pilot for a WB teleseries, but it follows many of the same beats as the popular 2018 feature film. Again we see the hero first as a small child, living amidst surface-dwelling humans with his mother and father, only to have his mother stolen from him by mysterious sea-dwellers. Then, after growing to adulthood with his father as confidante, the hero learns that his mother was a native of sunken Atlantis, and that the Atlanteans are coming back to give him grief. The pilot's biggest change from that template is that this version of Arthur "Aquaman" Curry (Justin Hartley) isn't the product of a mer-woman and a surface-dweller; Arthur's paternal unit adopts Little Arthur and marries his mother after finding them drifting in the ocean.

It's not clear, within the limits of a forty-minute pilot, why Atlanteans start messing in Mature Arthur's life after leaving him alone for roughly fifteen years, but there are both good water-breathers (Ving Rhames) and bad ones called "sirens" who can morph into claw-handed demons (Adrianne Palicki). But the script, by SMALLVILLE's showrunners Michael Millar and Alfred Gough, certainly piles on lots of subplots for development in the ongoing series that didn't happen. Arthur and his dad live in the Florida Keys, just a stone's throw from the mysterious Bermuda Triangle, somehow tied into the underwater city of Atlantis (never seen). There's a government agent investigating the recrudescence of Atlanteans, and a female Navy pilot who ends up "racing" her plane against Arthur, swimming below her in the sea like a human torpedo. A Navy man is found sixty years after he disappeared, but he hasn't aged-- though he doesn't get any older, thanks to an Atlantean assassin. Arthur barely has time to suss out any of these impending plot-threads, but he does get to slay the evil siren who maybe kidnapped his mother. 

In addition to some engaging plotlines, the pilot provided a few nice visual moments showing the wonders of the ocean, albeit on a TV budget. Probably this would have made a good show, certainly better than many of the abortions brought into imperfect life after the WB channel merged with the UPN and begot the horror that was the CW.