AQUAMAN, KING OF ATLANTIS (2021)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

I was sure there was no way this 3-part HBO Max series-- edited into a movie for the DVD market-- would be even passably good. The last time I saw this sort of "extreme bigfoot" animation, it was in the 2020 teleseries THUNDERCATS ROAR, which turned the THUNDERCATS franchise into low farce, apparently in a lame attempt to emulate Cartoon Network's popular TEEN TITANS GO.

To my surprise, KING is actually a reasonably well-done comedy-adventure despite all the silly humor-- which is all the more remarkable in that three of the four credited KING writers worked on THUNDERCATS ROAR. Possibly someone-- DC Comics, or James Wan, who produced the series-- told the scribes not to go overboard with the jokes and maybe ruin the movie franchise, given that Wan had enjoyed financial success with the 2018 live-action Aqua-movie and planned to direct the sequel. 

KING takes place some time after the events of the 2018 movie but is not strictly bound by its continuity, nor does its story play into the two-years-later Aqua-sequel. All that essentially matters is that Aquaman reigns in Atlantis and apparently has had some heavy dates with Mera, though the two are not yet married as they would be in the official sequel. But Aquaman is much more of a dweeb (with unexplained sea-green hair), and Mera is extremely pugnacious, constantly advocating that the two of them should punch their way out of problems. Yet, even though the comics character is more traditionally feminine, somehow the schtick of feisty Mera and the more reserved Sea King works pretty well. Also an unexpected plus: changing the support-character of Vulko-- a grave older man in the comics and in the live-action film (played by Willem Dafoe) -- into an anally retentive young guy.

The three episodes are plotted so that they seem like installments of the same story, largely because the first one starts with the hero and his squeeze investigating a missing Atlantean city. This leads them into battle with a Russian evildoer named Mortikov, who disappears in Episode 2, which focuses upon a classic Aqua-villain, The Fisherman, and then Mortikov returns in the third part, taking on a revised version of a very obscure Aqua-foe, The Scavenger. And as a bonus, the script works in the hero's vexatious half-brother Ocean Master. Further, when the writers worked in a couple of very minor "assistant menaces" who were and are ultra-obscure-- "The Fire Trolls" from the comic book, and "Mirror Men" from the Aqua-cartoon of the sixties-- I suspected the scribes were instructed to try winning over old comics-fogeys (like me) with nods to very old continuity-fodder.

But the use of "moldy oldies" didn't sell me on KING; I just liked the fact that a fair number of the jokes landed. A few were driven into the ground-- really, is the Atlanteans inability to understand how baseball works all that amusing? But others work reasonably well, particularly with regard to slapstick violence. When Mera tries to punch out Scavenger, the villain uses Aquaman as a shield, so that Mera ends up simultaneously hitting her boyfriend and apologizing for the hits.

Despite my positive comments, I think it's just as well this experiment was confined (thus far) to just these three outings.