Sleeping with the Fishes: Aquaman 2 and the Death of the DCEU

 

What began with so much ambition ten years ago with Man of Steel in 2013, gurgles its way to a watery grave with this weekend's release of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. I feel bad for director James Wan and everyone involved in A&TLK as this project arrives with an air of total futility about it. Honestly, even if it wasn't already known that the DC cinematic universe was due to be rebooted, I think A&TLK would have had the same inevitable last gasp vibe to it. Exhaustion clings to this movie like barnacles to a boat. It feels like the DCEU has been utterly played out. 

In 2018, the first Aquaman was a breath of fresh air for the DCEU. Colorful, unabashedly embracing of its fantasy elements and bereft of any hint of dreary edge lord attitude, James Wan showed that the DC universe could go all in on fun and that audiences would respond. It became the most successful film in the DCEU, bringing in the kind of box office results that were typically associated with the MCU. Given the fact that it grossed over a billion dollars, a sequel was always going to happen. But in between then and now, the plug was pulled on the DCEU in the wake of 2022's Black Adam and as soon as that happened, everything that was already in the pipeline, including A&TLK, instantly felt dead on arrival. 

Perhaps if The Flash had done a better job of wrapping up the previous era and setting up the next, A&TLK wouldn't have felt so much like an afterthought but it didn't - if anything The Flash only made everything more muddled - and so A&TLK arrives less as a fond farewell to the last ten years but as exactly what it is: the unintended end of an era, devoid of any special fanfare. 

That's something that was beyond the control of anyone involved with A&TLK but as I said earlier, had this arrived in a world where the DCEU was still pushing on, I think it would have still left audiences with an overwhelming sense of "why are we still doing this?" Or even more specifically, "...why did we need an Aquaman 2?" 

The answer to that, of course, is that no movie as successful as Aquaman was ever going to not have a Part 2 - especially when it was part of an ongoing cinematic universe. But as much as Wan tries to recapture the same sense of fun as the original, it's clear that he left it all on the table with the first film. Some characters aren't meant to support a string of sequels. Not every character lends themselves to a franchise and I think that's definitely true of Aquaman. If nothing else, it definitely can be said that if there was going to be an Aquaman 2, they should have found someone else who was as eager to put their stamp on the character as Wan was when he did the original. 

As with the first film, there are plenty of cool designs here involving the various Atlantean technology, undersea environments, and fantastical creatures (in A&TLK's best moments, Wan leans into the horror vibe - there's even a neat aural shout out to Texas Chain Saw Massacre at one point) but there's nothing here that outdoes or improves on anything in the first film and it's hard not to get the sense that Wan is fully aware of that too. Add to that the fact that this is all in support of a franchise - both Aquaman and the larger DCEU itself - that we all know is finished and this just feels like one exhausted sigh of a movie. 

It may not have started off as such but the fact that A&TLK was completed with the full knowledge that it would end up serving as the last word on the DCEU definitely puts the last lines of the movie in an amusing light. Yes, the train was already on the tracks when the plug was pulled on the DCEU so there was no way to rethink the movie in its entirety in order to put a respectful cap on the past decade of films but Jason Momoa's final speech easily could've been rewritten on the fly to send things out on a more slightly elegiac note, had they wanted to - especially as the occasion that he's addressing is one of change, of moving from one era to the next with a spirit of hope. So his words could have worked in the context of the film while also applying to the meta context of the moment. 

But they straight up said "nope" to that and I guess in the end I have to respect that the last words spoken in the DCEU (and I'm paraphrasing) are "...I'm Aquaman! Woo! Yeah!" I don't know if I would call it a "fuck you" to the DCEU per se but it definitely feels like, hey this is our moment and we're not sharing it and we're going to revel in the fact that freaking Aquaman of all characters is the last one standing and the last one out the door.  

Now, there may well have been zero message underlying Momoa's last words but when the mid credit scene has a character happily eating a cockroach, it's hard not to feel like this wasn't a warm or respectful goodbye to the DCEU. I have to imagine there was a feeling of being fucked over once James Gunn's reboot was announced and if some resentment towards that manifested in the movie in some way, it wouldn't be surprising. 

In any case, the ten year odyssey of the DCEU is now done and over. A lot could be said about all the decisions that were made over the past ten years, many of them terrible, but at this point dissecting the many failures of the DCEU seems like wasted energy (although I do hope someone writes a book about all of it one day). The bottom line is that I don't think Warners/DC ever knew how to properly showcase these iconic characters and I think they made a critical early error in entrusting their universe to Zack Snyder. He's a talented director, yes, but also one who has no feel for the DC universe - or for the concept of superheroes - whatsoever. If you gave Snyder something like Miracleman or Spawn, he could likely kick ass with it but something that requires a much more pure outlook on selflessness and altruism, forget it. 

Warners should've seen the reaction to Man of Steel as a five alarm emergency and ditched Snyder post haste. The impulse to keep trying to course correct turned the DCEU into a wobbly Jenga tower. It was never going to right itself. 

Will James Gunn do better by the DC universe? I think so. I certainly hope he will. The thing is, I don't see how he could do any worse. For the last ten years, we watched a studio continually fail to know what to do with the most iconic superheroes of all time. As I look at the various rankings of the DCEU films being posted across the internet now that the book has been closed on this era, I think the most damning thing that can be said about the DCEU is that, however you rank the films, whatever anyone puts at the top, Matt Reeves' The Batman is a better movie than every single one of them.   

Hey There, Bat Fans and Super Friends!

With the last vestiges of the Snyderverse due to hit theaters next year prior to whatever DCU reset James Gunn has planned, a promotional special that aired in prime time on the CW six scant years ago stands as a choice artifact of the Snyderverse era. On January 19th, 2016, ahead of the March release of BvS that year, the CW aired DC Films Presents The Dawn of the Justice League. Hosted by comic book/pop culture guru Kevin Smith with Geoff Johns, DC comic writer and Chief Creative Officer of DC Entertainment, joining him to share the latest inside info, the mission of this special was to hype the hell out of the Snyderverse, which at the time only consisted of Man of Steel. 

In his role as host, Kevin Smith delivers the best acting of his career, reacting to every bit of info from Johns with rapturous surprise as though he's learning about all this stuff in real time right before our eyes. Why anyone decided this was the angle they wanted Smith to play here, I don't know but for what it's worth he does his best to convince viewers that he somehow knows less about DC's upcoming films than any fan on the internet. 

Some might roll their eyes at Smith's relentless hucksterism on behalf of Warners' corporate product but I actually find his deep dedication to this infomercial endearing. Even if the surprise that he greets every announcement with is feigned, I don't feel like the enthusiasm he's expressing is a total put on. The fact is, all this stuff looked legitimately cool and you know that past being a paid shill, Smith is first and foremost a fanboy at heart and like every other fan weaned on the exploits of these characters, he truly hoped that all of these movies would be incredible.  

While some might think that viewing this special today is an opportunity to snicker at an enormous face plant (it is crazy to see so much laid out here that never came to anything - I forgot Cyborg was supposed to get a movie, for instance) it doesn't hit me like that at all. I actually find it to be more of a bittersweet thing. All involved here are, one assumes, good people (well, save for Ezra Miller) who set out to do their best and make some cool movies. It genuinely sucks that the whole thing fell apart. Is the tale of the failure of the Snyderverse a story of a short sighted corporation undermining an artist at every turn or is it that of a visionary director put in charge of a universe of characters that he didn't truly have a feel for? Depends on who you ask. A little of both, I say. But whatever your take may be, watching this special is like a rush of nostalgia for a future that never was. 

 

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No matter what lies ahead for the DC universe, even if everything James Gunn does is a rousing success, the Snyderverse will remain the preferred live action rendition of the DC Universe for some fans (and not all of them internet trolls). There's a loyal fanbase who will always see the Snyderverse as their DCU. Watching this special is a reminder that DC Films once believed it was theirs as well. 

A Superman For All Seasons

Pour one out for the Snyderverse. Pour one out too for whatever we might have called the Dwayne Johnson-driven version of the DCEU because that's dead too. In one for the "life comes at you fast" files, the latest news out of Warners Bros./DC is that just months after appearing in Black Adam's post credit scene and announcing his comeback, Henry Cavill is officially done as Superman. 

That's a bitter pill to swallow for the actor's fans and surely for Cavill himself whose return to the part seemed assured. But, as we've come to learn, just because there's a post credit scene in a DC movie, it doesn't mean it's going anywhere. As a movie, Black Adam was kind of wobbly but in getting Cavill back, it at least showed that Dwayne Johnson understood you can't have a proper DC Universe if you're leaving Superman out to dry. Clearly new DC Studios co-chairs and co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran felt the same way but had their own ideas on how to deal with that. 

I already thought it was crazy that the post credit scene at the end of Justice League with Deathstroke breaking Lex Luthor out of jail went nowhere but that the Black Adam post credit scene, the thing that was meant to establish the next chapter in the DCEU, is also going to be a dead end is just wild. You would think if you put something big out there, like if you cast Joe Manganiello as Deathstroke and go to the effort of making a letter perfect costume for him that it means you're committed to following up on that but it turns out that, nah, that's not the case. So given that, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that the Cavill post credit scene will also come to nothing but yet it is. I mean, Deathstroke is one thing but I would think it'd be much harder to slam the door in Superman's face but here we are.  

That said, Gunn and Safran are making the right call in wiping the slate clean. The biggest problem with the DCEU is that it got off on the wrong foot with Man of Steel and everything since then has been about trying to cling to as much as Snyder's vision as possible while at the same time being forced to course correct with every movie. It put the DCEU in a constant state of reacting to its prior missteps, unable to chart a fresh course, free of baggage. Bringing Cavill back, even if you crafted a more fitting Superman film for him, would still be one more course correction. Time to move on. 

Whether Gunn and Safran will have more success than Snyder when it comes to creating a cohesive DC Universe remains to be seen. After all, Snyder had a grand vision too but all it took was for the first film out of the gate to stumble for all of it to unravel. Who's to say if Warners will stay the course with Gunn or panic at the first sign that it isn't clicking? In Gunn's favor (outside of the fact that he's actually the boss now and he only has to answer to himself) is the fact that he really knows these characters and has a true affection for DC. 

Snyder is a brilliant visual stylist but I think a lot of what's essential to the heart of these characters, particularly concerning Superman, simply struck Snyder as being a bunch of naive kid stuff and he believed modern audiences would feel the same. The result of that cynicism was Man of Steel. 

Ultimately, the choices that were made on Man of Steel torpedoed Snyder's take on the DCEU. It was never going to be safe to put the full weight of a universe on that cracked foundation. As deeply unfair as it may be to Cavill, it is what it is. When your new DC universe starts off with Superman being forced to kill, the whole thing is doomed to fail. Everyone involved should have known this before finding out the hard way but they didn't. 

Over the years, I've always been flabbergasted at the ineptitude of Warners when it's come to their handling of Superman. When it comes to their DC properties, Superman should be considered the crown jewel but they've either treated him like junk or simply shown no aptitude for understanding who the character is or what he's meant to represent. This is a character whose big screen adventures have been on an erratic course since 1983. After the first two Christopher Reeve movies, whose success seems more and more miraculous as time goes on, the franchise stumbled on its third film and has never fully recovered since. For a character of Superman's stature, that's insane. When superheroes are the biggest thing in pop culture and you can't figure out what to do with the #1 character in that pantheon, that's nuts.  

As much as some might insist that Richard Donner's '78 Superman and Christopher Reeve's take on the Metropolis Marvel wouldn't (pardon the expression) fly today, I disagree. People talk about what a jaded era we're living in now but forget that the '70s was a deeply cynical time too. The US was still recovering from Vietnam and Watergate had shaken our faith in our institutions. If ever there was a time when a hero who touted the virtues of old fashioned American ideals should have gone over like a lead balloon, it was then. But Superman: The Movie cut through the cynicism of the '70s and gave people something they were yearning for. 

Superman can still do the same today, if they get it right. The key is not to make Superman adapt to the times. Times change, seasons come and go, but Superman should always remain true to who he is. That's his most enduring super power.

Say Hi To The Bad Guy

 

In case you hadn't noticed, The Rock is not playing a good guy in Black Adam. That has seemed pretty clear from the start but for those who were still wondering, the tagline on Black Adam's latest poster is here to remove any doubt. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is a superhero movie, people, because "The Time of Heroes is Over." Everyone got that now? As much as I think Black Adam looks like a well mounted spectacle, and as much as I'm rooting for Warners/DC to get their shit together on the movie end, I feel like this tagline perfectly sums up why the direction of the DCEU is so utterly mismanaged. Saying that the Time of Heroes is over when it comes to the DCEU is such a laughable selling point. I mean, help me out here. If you want to say that the Time of Heroes is over, you've got to be able to tell me when the hell it started. I don't think I'm the only one who feels like they're still waiting on that. 

I mean, according to the calendar, the current age of DC movies began in 2013 with Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. But that big relaunch, the movie that was supposed to reestablish Superman as a big screen powerhouse, the movie that was supposed to position DC to really take on Marvel in a big way, ended with Superman murdering his opponent. That this also followed the leveling of Metropolis as Superman and General Zod waged a careless battle that left everything in rubble around them only added to the sense that this was, on a fundamental, core level, a poorly judged take on Superman. This is your reboot of Superman, a movie that's supposed to be the starting point for not just more Superman but for an entire newly minted DC cinematic universe and this is how you want to go with it? Come on now. It's incredible to me that there was no one in the room to say "Wait, this is stupid. What the fuck are we doing?"

Obviously Man of Steel does have its fans but setting aside the technical skill involved in it and whether it is, in and of itself, an interesting interpretation of Superman, the bottom line is that it felt made by people who didn't fully buy into the character. It felt like a rejection of what some might call the inherent corniness of Superman. Coming off of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, it seems like the feeling from everyone involved in Man of Steel, including Nolan himself as producer and Dark Knight scripter David S. Goyer who wrote Man of Steel's screenplay after conceiving of the story with Nolan, believed that applying the darkness of Batman's world to Superman was the only viable way to make him work for a modern audience. If someone were to say that Superman is a character who has always seemed too good to be true, the makers of Man of Steel would no doubt be the first to say "we agree!" They didn't so much adapt Superman so much as they diminished him in order to make the character bear the burden of their own cynicism. There's no law against being a cynic but it's probably better that those people not be put in charge of adapting one of the most inspirational characters in fiction. Who knows, they might choose to do something dumb, like turn him into a killer.

Yes, it's true that Superman has killed in the comics before. Most notably, in issue #22 of Superman's mid '80s relaunch, Superman was compelled to execute the trio of Phantom Zone criminals by exposing them to green kryptonite. This was presented as an absolute last resort, though, and only after these remorseless sociopaths had murdered five billion people. Even then it was an extreme outlier event for Superman in course of, what at the time was just over five decades' worth of adventures and, importantly, there was the storytelling space afforded by comics to get into the emotional repercussions of it. A movie, on the other hand, is a whole different beast. Things hit in a whole different way on film and there isn't a ready opportunity to address the fallout of a shocking, out of character turn.

As filmmakers, when you know the story that you plan on telling and you know that the images you're creating to tell that story are all going to be projected on a giant screen, you should pause and ask yourself, even at the screenwriting stage: is Superman breaking a man's neck what we really want to put up there? For Superman to kill evil Kryptonians with kryptonite in the pages of a comic book is kind of grim, sure, but yet it still comfortably resides in the realm of fantasy. He's exposing them to kryptonite radiation, not breaking their necks or strangling them to death. As dark as Batman is, we've never seen him straight up murder someone in a movie. But thanks to Man of Steel, Superman's got blood on his hands. Yes, it's Kryptonian blood but still. I don't think you have to be a hopeless Pollyanna to recognize what a misstep that is. Some will say "But Superman didn't have a choice!" and to that I say, well, Superman didn't write the script. People did. They chose to put the character in a certain situation and then didn't want to work to show him being smart enough to think his way out of that moment without resorting to killing. Everyone involved with Man of Steel, all these fucking grown adults, should have had a moment before shooting even began when they stopped to ask themselves "Oh, for God's sake, what are we even trying to prove here with this edgy nonsense?" But they didn't. And what we got is what we got.

At least if there had been a Man of Steel 2 to follow up on the events of the first film and if it became clear that, yes, there was a plan to deal with this and that it was all part of a carefully laid out character arc, then ok. Fair enough. But that wasn't the case. Man of Steel, and the DCEU itself, is going to turn ten next year and we still haven't gotten a Man of Steel 2. At this point it's pretty clear that we never will. Instead we got more of Henry Cavill's Superman in BvS: Dawn of Justice, a movie where Batman is trying to kill Superman because the destruction Superman caused in Man of Steel convinced Bruce Wayne that Superman was a threat to humanity that needed to be put down. We could have gotten a World's Finest movie instead where Batman and Superman meet and become friends and allies but, um, I guess that never occurred to anyone at Warners. Superman was also seen again in the two different cuts of Justice League, only one of which (the lesser of the two) is actually canon to the DCEU and neither of which gives significant screentime to Superman, with him being (sigh) dead for most of the running times of both versions. 

Point being, Superman has not been well served in the DCEU (that's not to fault Henry Cavill in any way, who did a fine job with what he had to work with) and the bottom line for me is if you can't figure out what to do with Superman, then you're never going to truly figure the rest of it. If you can't wrap your head around Superman, your vision of the DC universe is going to be forever lacking. He's the cornerstone to all of it. There have been some genuinely heroic DCEU highlights like Aquaman and Shazam! (many would also cite the first Wonder Woman but outside of the No Man's Land scene, I don't think the movie works very well) but as far as portraying the kind of shining age of heroes that a fully functioning DC cinematic universe ought to, things have not gone well. 

They botched Superman, they botched the Justice League. And they dropped the ball hard on Wonder Woman in her second outing. What kind of "time of heroes" is that?  A pretty shitty one, in my opinion. Out of the ten DCEU movies so far, three of them - the two Suicide Squad films and Birds of Prey - have already been about antiheroes. So how Black Adam is supposed to represent some kind of bold shakeup for the DCEU, I don't know. In the Black Adam trailer when Hawkman tells Black Adam that heroes don't kill and Black Adam shoots back with "Well I do!" how is this not a ridiculous exchange in a cinematic universe that started with Superman - Superman!! - killing someone?

I'm not saying that I'm not excited for Black Adam or that I think it won't be good. The thought of seeing Golden Age characters like Dr. Fate realized on screen is a cool prospect for this comic fan and Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, Jungle Cruise) is a very solid director so I actually have a lot of optimism towards it. If anything, I'd be surprised if it disappointed. I'm just saying it is genuinely confounding to see such a massive effort put into launching an antihero in the DCEU when they still have not gotten the hero part quite right. 

Until Warners/DC realizes that a grim n' gritty DC universe isn't a direction that benefits their characters in the long term, we're going to keep having these short sighted moves to try and establish DC's credentials as the edgy alternative to Marvel. To see the trailers for Black Adam and see his power set in action is to really feel the gap between where DC is and where they ideally should be. You've got a guy doing all the stuff we identify with Superman like flight and super strength and invulnerability but I guess we're supposed to find it all cooler when Black Adam's doing it because he's, like, dark man. He's no hero! It'd be one thing if they really tried with Superman and then decided to go this route but they didn't. Instead they tried to make Superman dark and when that (predictably) didn't work, the answer wasn't to fix their mistakes with Superman and restore the proper luster to this icon, it was to move on to a character that was better suited to being the edgy guy they wanted in the first place.

It says a lot about the DCEU, and none of it good, that "The Time of Heroes is Over" would have fit just as well as a tagline on the posters for Man of Steel as it does on Black Adam's. Even better, I'd say. By rights, Man of Steel should have kicked off a new heroic age for the DC universe. It should have served as a full throated statement from Warners/DC that, hey, we have the real deal here. If you want to talk about superheroes, this is the definitive article and we're going to remind you why that is. Instead it felt made by people who were constantly scratching their heads, asking "Wait, why does anyone care about this guy?" If that actually wasn't the behind the scenes vibe on Man of Steel, you sure can't tell by the movie. 

I don't begrudge Black Adam whatever success it might go on to have but it would just be nice if the movie actually represented the true change of pace for the DCEU that the studio seems to think it does rather than looking like business as usual.