Half in the Bag Episode 156: Aquaman

half in the bag Colgate take me away whoa we just get so swamped around the holidays phones ringing off the hook you know you did ring once yesterday that is a wrong number yeah they were looking for a VCR repair shop oh wait that's what we do oh [ __ ] oh oh oh my god oh my god lightning fast VBR repair how can I help you no no VBR repair not VCR but this is lightning fast VBR repair you idiot don't ever call here again no Mike we are lightning fast VCR repair what the [ __ ] is a VCR oh my brain doesn't work anymore it's like I got kicked in the head by a mule oh you saw Aquaman to porcupine bungalow Hart trampoline condom zak bagans Betty Boop diaper hygiene from the director of the conjuring James Wan comes his most frightening film to date Aquaman Jason mimosa Amber Heard Nicole Kidman Patrick Wilson Dolph Lundgren and Willem Dafoe round out the cast of people that look like they have no idea what's going on around them why it's a spectacle of fish magic bad acting sharks tidal waves bad acting CGI water hair and embarrassing costumes that all fits snugly into a boilerplate plot about a merman becoming a king or something take Thor Lord of the Rings Black Panther and splash put them in a blender then just add water no pun intended and voila you've got mail I'm going to drink both coffee and a beer in an attempt to recreate how I felt while watching Aquaman hmm so a stimulant and a depressant yes yes okay so Jay what did you think of Aquaman uh why does a movie about Aquaman the little guy talks to fish need to be the same running times 2001 a Space Odyssey [Music] this movie's two and a half hours long and it's about three movies worth of plot crammed into one to where it it becomes kind of a mess even though some of the visuals and ideas are fun yeah I would describe this movie as overstaying it's welcome it's it's a it's a someone that comes over you know and visits and it's like ah this person's cool it's Joe he's my friend from high school he's the class cut-up yep and and everybody likes him sure it's great to see Joe again he's really fun and then midnight rolls around when I am and Joe won't leave that's an old job Belushi SNL sketch they call it's framed like a like a horror movie and this is Tim like I don't have some of these potato chips I don't want to be rude but my wife is very tired hey there's a good movie on tonight I think I'll call up some friends and watch it over here yeah okay let's let's talk positives first so we're not here to crap on a DC movie again because this was a competent well made movie from a good director James Wan that's the highest price you can give it is that this is the first DC movie that feels like somebody's vision well aside from Wonder Woman which which was a good movie to the Wonder Woman gets the character stuff right but it still has like jaded terrible action like that it had a lot of like speed up slow down that's of and then the ending is just a CGI mess so it gets a fright this movie gets the character stuff right and the visuals and the action scenes are competent there's lots of James Wan likes his wide shots he likes wide-angle lenses lots of swooping around people punch in he gets all that stuff the action and this was good until again it overstays its welcome the for the scene when Aquaman boards the submarine and fights those guys and there was it was good it was like a really good action movie and I was like but as far as like if you say like the gold standard of superhero movies is the Marvel movies what are you some kind of Marvel shill I am I get paid by them to show their products and of course they get checks on a daily basis in the seven-figure range no shower vast audience no because those those like have they have weights to them they have like gravitas excitement there and and also there's a lot of humor and witty dialogue to counterbalance that like the fan oohs movie I really enjoyed the fan oohs movie I mean it was great Wonder Woman felt more like a Marvel movie because I think the interaction between Wonder Woman and Chris Pine was a little more whittier they had a little more chemistry oh yeah Jason Momoa and Amber Heard of zero chemistry yes I know hey what are you doing we need water you're the closest source I could've just peed on it it's like a puzzle with all the proper puzzle pieces and they're all put together well and and but when you look back it's just like a picture of like like a sewer it's not the beautiful ocean and the sunset yeah they hope for it but all the pieces are there that should work yeah you know and and for a while up until about halfway through the movie I was like hey that all these things are falling into place rather well you've got multi-tiered villains you've got Patrick Wilson as King gooba gooba as Bible man I said yeah he's armor he looks like funky Bible man ocean master but his his goal is I'm gonna unite all the all the underwater it's very Lord of the Rings kind of plot Lord of the Rings black panther they have the underwater city there they're you know unknown to the rest of the world and then he's combining all the different tribes to band together to I'm falling asleep as like yeah villain plot here is the far more interesting plot of a bad guy should say of the mercenary high seas pirate guy yeah and his father and his father isn't saved by Aquaman's let's revenge so you got you got you got your two-two boilerplate superhero villains revenge man and conquer the world man Loki yeah you got those two cards so it's like then I'm just gonna play the one the one hand they got another hand on the side but then they that one of those cards they lost half way through like where'd it go oh well it fell under the tables oh we get we get lots and lots of dialogue explaining the mythology of the underwater worlds and that was good yeah becoming a king they should call this movie a deep-sea exposition oh you thought of that all afternoon didn't you I thought about it well I had to think about something halfway through the movie when they were fighting in that little village and it went on for 45 minutes and my brain started to wander I love them I want to go get a coffee yeah you just you're just like I'm gonna take a break I check it out well I didn't know that that scene in particular and that's the problem like all the action scenes in this movie not all of them but a lot of them just feel so pointless yeah they're just in there because we have to have action I'm comparing I'd compare it to I just recently saw I know you talked about it on the 2018 ketchup video I saw Mission Impossible fallout which is the best action movie since like Mad Max fury road and all the action scenes in that movie are great even aside from the fact that there's so many practical effects and stumps and all that even aside from that it's like each action scene is like okay there's the larger story of the movie and then in this action scene here is our goal here's what we have to accomplish by the end of this sequence boom and in this movie especially that big fight halfway through it's just like we have to kill Aquaman and then it goes they throw people through walls and it just goes on and on and on it's like like a frustrating nightmare not the movie as a whole but all the action scenes it's the smaller stuff like it's how silly everything looked I like that you have people riding giant sea horses and-and-and sharks they got a little saddles on the Sharks and it's just like you know James Wan knew that this all look completely ridiculous but then these action scenes just go on forever yeah oh now it's you know first it's he's gonna take back the kingdom but now it's a subpar Indiana Jones globe-trotting movie and that stuff is where it really fell apart because that's where they really tried to beef up the relationship between Aquaman and Amber Heard there was a little like montage of them like like there's some weird song playing that I didn't recognize yeah they got a little Italian village yeah but I kind of liked the world-building stuff like hey cuz they explained a lot which was nice like yeah and it wasn't an origin story we got little snippets of flashbacks sprinkled throughout which it was nice that it wasn't just a literal chronological order of events right it starts off in the past and then jumps forward and then they go back she just show Willem Dafoe training Aquaman some reason I think he knows that someday he will be the the true king and he doesn't like Patrick Wilson so he secretly goes to the surface and trains him fair enough and for hopes that one day you will get the Trident from smog in the caverns but yeah they were like okay so I was like why can why do those guys have to wear suits with water in them and then everybody and they're like oh you know only so-and-so can breathe water and air okay and then in order to have like different groups under the the around the Atlantis area they explained that like some of them some of the people that were down there evolved and some of them devolved for some reason and they're like like fish monsters it's just an excuse to have cool creatures I guess they fought like an army of lobsters at one point that was my favorite scene in the round James Bond is a horror film maker I like that whole sequence there they're like these these Lovecraftian fish monsters right that part while they're jumping off the boat they got the the player there's the red light and so on slow motion yeah like swirling around him it was wonderful speaking of Jango Fett the lobster battle was very Attack of the Clones like with those like lobster leg things with like snouts shooting lasers and it looked very similar visually to attack of the claws [Music] yeah the arena monster the the like the thing will be one fights with the spear yeah it's like a crab monster and it looks almost identical to the giant thing that Aquaman rides at the end so it's like yeah like oh my gosh and then you get Phantom Menace comparisons the Gungan city better remind me of that yeah and that's the last thing you want to be reminded of in any movie is the prequels it's a giant it's a it's a giant mixture of like 18 different films like ones I described in the opening like yeah for Lord of the Rings all these like mythical life you can be the King you are the true king you've got to get the mythical a sword or spear or try to make Aquaman into this epic which is bizarre they did a good job in terms of pulling it off but they did well they just did the Justice League movie that should be their big epic like technical thing and that was a giant disaster I would think they would go smaller with this make like their version of an ant-man type movie or the stakes are smaller the this the the you know the story is smaller but instead they upped it and it's like the most expensive movie ever made like it looks like it would be there's a gigantic Lord of the Rings scale battle at the end that is ultimately pointless and doesn't really connect with the main story yeah it's like the story is the conflict between Aquaman and Bible man but for some reason we have to spend and it's not even that long there's like Ollie it's kind of visually cool but it's like five minutes and then the movie forgets about it it's weird well Bible man wanted wanted to recruit the the lobster people to join his this quest to take over the surface this is the movie because the surface has garbage and battleships yes and that's the thing too is is is the the Black Panther comparison where you have this society that has apparently solved all of their problems or has a flawlessly perfect society and the technology techno supreme technology potentially no hunger no needs for the civilian population no internal problems basically but they still operate on a futile fight to the Deaf mentality and Patrick Wilson the king of everyone who wants to unite everyone to conquer the surface world because of garbage I mean I guess like do you know how [ __ ] big the oceans are I mean yes we we have ships battleships that float around on the surface and people throw garbage in the water this garbage in the water and Patrick Wilson as a threat or a warning makes a huge tidal wave that washes all the trash up on land and some warships and some warships - and really that's all I need to do all yes to really do is come up and float in the air and go on CNN and go hi I'm the king of the Atlanteans were real we're down here yeah stop putting your garbage in the water if he had any forethought or any leadership yeah he would say we can easily like create a tidal wave that will drown all of your major cities you don't really have to conquer the the surface world and and he even goes to the extent of like like falsifying an attack by a submarine that he pays the the pirate guy to attack you know the King amber hurts father yeah Dolph Lundgren to make it look like the humans are attacking them now right well really like that wasn't a big problem it wasn't really a big problem so it's like yes bad guy stamped rubber stamp plot bad guy wants to conquer the earth you know when really the conflict you could have done without all of that gotten rid of that pirate character and just had the conflict be the fight for Atlantis between I keep wanting to called Thor I mean Aquaman and and and Patrick woolsley I think that would be too close to the Black Panther premise right yes but instead it's too close to several movies as opposed to just one and say that that is the big problem is that we're discussing the plot to this movie and the plot is on the bottom of the list it's all about like cinematic universe building yeah you have to at least care enough for the like the visuals aren't gonna carry the entire movie like you have to give it at least a little enough of a character work to where you give a [ __ ] even if the plot is basic if there is a film that deserves a cynical approach to our review it's this because there is that this is this is like more so than a Marvel movie this one is kind of a flatline and in the funny like oh I isn't Aquaman kind of like like charismatic and charming and you know superhero ask isn't their relationship like important or you know I care about it no flatline their plot is like boiler plate here's here's all the things and then really it's just you know a bunch an entire cast and crew of people that just don't care about the movie they're making it was really just a kind of like I think they took a note from Wonder Woman and you said before why didn't they scale it back yeah and and I was thinking about that during the movie I was like this would have been great if this came out like a couple years before the Justice League oh sure yeah it's like they did everything like they built up to infinity war like them yeah wisely started with iron man DC is constantly trying to course-correct every movie is like a course correction from the last movie yeah if this movie was like an hour shorter and you streamline the plot pick a plot and go with that then it probably would've been a lot more charming because I visually I liked all the weird underwater stuff that was a different setting for a movie like this giant crab monster showing up at the ends like that's that's fun but I just didn't give a [ __ ] about any of the characters or anything that was happening by that point yeah [Music] I was hoping at the end when Bible man and Aquaman have to fight again against that the super trident and a Bible man says you know we've got a fight to see who's gonna be the king yeah and there's ooming up to the surface cuz well I'm supposed to fight him on your own town yes outside of the ocean I wanted them to just shoot out and then like crash land in like a shopping mall sure you know what I mean and then they're things skids to a halt and they're kind of standing there someone drops their coffee cup people are Christmas shopping or whatever and then they kind of Patrick Wilson and an Aquaman kind of look at each other and then the seizures are going world knows something's going down and yeah you said they're fighting on a ship in the ocean and it's raining and it's and not that the movie is dark it's not very Zack Snyder ish tonally but it still has those kind of visuals that are just like yeah basic fighting and dark gritty environments stuff I think for the silliness of it it took itself too seriously it needed that and that again I'm not a shill for Marvel although I do get paid by them enormous sums of money well that makes you a shill then cha-ching remember how much they paid us to review Ant Man and the wasp Friday to cash but my point was when you have something silly like Thor with the Bifrost the magical rainbow bridge and teleportation thing is there a magic bridge - I did magical rainbow bridge but they didn't laugh at it and Thor Thor was more fish out of water than Aquaman talk about ironic and and that's the fun part that people relate to yeah is it some sort of prototype pleasant all the stuff that's coming out of you or lay eggs looks like eggs but when Patrick Wilson said call me the ocean master and when nicole kidman had to wear a fish costume can we talk about that sure where does that suit I was gonna say because she's in the beginning of the movie and it's before Aquaman was born so they digitally de-aged her which was mildly distracting but not too bad but well uh Jango Fett's a toupee was [Laughter] dysley if you're gonna cast the cold Kidman and you're gonna digitally de-ager you know she's gonna show up later in the movie in present time but they keep trying to treat it like she's dead but then yeah whatever if you can't predict that this whole move everything of this movie's predictable but uh she shows up and she you know rescues them and they're on that island where we see like dinosaurs in like one shot which was kind of fun it was a bubble of Earth um air inside the core of the earth yes but yeah at first you're supposed to think she's a fish monster and then you realize oh it's a person in a costume who's this gonna be and of course you know it's gonna be Nicole Kidman and then for the rest of her scenes during that whole part of the movie she's just wearing this fish monster outfit and she looks like the predator if you just put the Col Kidman set on the predator that's he looks like he there was a moment to like Jason mamoa does not introduce Amber Heard to Nicole Kidman he's just standing off to the side there yeah I liked it Aquaman goes and goes down into something to retrieve the magical Trident yes and then it cuts that we don't come back to them and and and this is Marvel DC comparison right okay he comes out of the water and Amber Heard is sitting on a rock and Nicole Kidman is like picking something out of her hair and then they look over and I was like what what the [ __ ] were they doing it's like they didn't know what they did for an hour and a half yeah and and really what you need is um you know I'm fighting the sea monster trying to get trying to hard cut I'm sitting there like so you know yeah how long you been on this island what now now what did you do when it came time feminine products then the audience chuckles while they're bored to tears but I'm fighting you need to be distracted from the plot basically you got to be distract from the plot and you need those relatable elements like what does Nicole Kidman's been in a bubble in the middle of the earth dinosaur bones you had seen any people and Aquaman didn't introduce her to this girl he has with him Mowgli mother this is so-and-so the daughter of King blah blah blah the daughter of Dolph Lundgren she is very important and she has magical powers she can control water and she saved my life when I had to fight Bible man in front of arena her name is I don't remember her but see that's what I mean relatability and and you know what cut out six or seven non-story progressing action sequences and yes like then you make the ones that you do have that much more exciting though the Wonder Woman there weren't a whole lot of action scenes in that movie they kind of build up to the Battle of Helm's Deep yes a couple a couple of little skirmishes with with works here are their works writing monster dogs and then you have the Battle of Helm's Deep that takes the last 20 minutes of the film when you have thousands 20 minutes trying to last hours are thousands of monsters marching the attention all the heroes uilt up over the course of one and a half movies to get to that point and that has that's there's consequence to that this is we're fighting the crab people or the lobster men because I kind of want you to join my seven seas army but I don't really need you yeah but we don't want to join but we haven't even been introduced to these crab people we're just all of a sudden watching them fight then they say Patrick Wilson didn't with just like by snapping your fingers you basically like devastated the entire earth with giant tidal waves why do you need seven armies of the seven oceans with crab monsters and giant Godzilla creatures yeah the time has come for Atlantis to rise again and Aquaman must face not one but two villains I think this film will play very well too 13 year old boys and and mentally deficient adults yeah don't be loud by the visuals do go a long way I mean there's there's cool things like when they're going down to Atlantis and like there's a sequence that's completely lit by like these purple jellyfish like you can tell there's a lot of thought put into all that stuff even though the two elderly people that walked out during the talk about it they've made it 2 hours and 10 minutes into the film and then they said that's enough enough ice limit when the crab monsters started fighting the the sharks that's when they were like I'm done our brains weren't wired for this me to the plugged-in elements Otis briefly want to mention there's a part when they're in the Sahara Desert and that's where we're supposed to get the was that like Romancing the Stone where they're going on adventures but they don't get along and then they fall in love it was like that [ __ ] and I noticed the music stuck out to me there where it was like that but like plucky cutesy oh yes it was like every like bad 90s movie I was like why is this why are they bringing this music bag okay I have a track for you okay in case you're wondering what Jays talking about here it is okay it was that music and I'll tell you why it was there Jay although you know the answer was to tell you how you should feel yeah I mean we we talked about movies aside from being VCR repair men we watched them for a reason yeah and and the whole time sitting there thinking I can't imagine having gone to this movie for the purpose of sitting down and enjoying it because seven other things are on top of that which is we got to fix our cinematic universe we've got to make the movie for this character we've got to insert these plots he needs to get his costume and the very bottom of it is engaging your audience in an interesting surprising and fun to watch story yeah because everything was predictable it was beat for beat what it should have been and you know to James once credit he delivered exactly what needed to be delivered he is he is a workman like a reliable filmmaker yeah I mean it's like he knew exactly what to make but they still the the arrow fell far short of achieving that Marvel formula I think I think they were relying more on the terms of Jason Momoa to carry it but he's not that charming really just kind of comes across like generic bro guy he's kind of a knucklehead yeah he needed they're bad but ya know I mean as an actor he's he's okay but I mean they like the character in the performance the charisma right there wasn't any charisma yeah he is a bit of a flat note so is Amber Heard so Zen for her so when you have the entire middle 45 minutes of your movie the two of them trying to relate and connect to each other it just we need more Willem Dafoe this was a very surprising sequel to The Life Aquatic though wait a second what are we doing you should cross the line across the line if you're going to quit Bill Murray as the King would have been great yeah that's like I was throwing the rock when you got Jeff Goldblum just deflating anything with his weird comedy even a spy goes here's the deal if you want to get back to ass plays a sperg guys God need someone like that yeah just Bill Murray to the surface yeah someone like like if the Patrick Wilson character was doing it more out of like ego and arrogance like I kind of made it fun but he's so serious and we're going to take over the tops like who cares boring boring yeah he could have been more corrupt like like like he enjoys the the spoils of being king you know and he wants to rule the whole world because maybe they're [ __ ] up on the surface that they they don't really have gone underwater like Vicodin like I'd like a reverse black panther right like Vicodin and maybe he took a secret trip to the surface world you know to like just to investigate it one time one day yeah and then he just holy [ __ ] this Taco Bell place is amazing I loved I don't have Taco Bell in Atlanta this is a great great tie-in fish meat he goes to like like like a bar and what is this oh you you want a shot sir what a what it's called booze a nice easy like Ruth's Chris Steakhouse he goes on a rollercoaster and down down in down underwater he is like he's Atlantean like mermaids as well he saw the fish he wants but but it's not the same he wants those treats of the surface world but the surface world is like like gross and and considered maybe like low-class to the the proud Atlanteans whatever and he's like I want to conquer them but really you know secretly he wants the spoils of the surface world he was Taco Bell and and booze and vicodins and steak dinners and roller coasters and cotton candy describes kind of the turning point okay you just start seeing tons of cotton it goes crazy and that's that's why King blah blah blah once wants to conquer the surface world because he wants the best of both worlds hey there you go Patrick Wilson's goal to conquer the surface to get Taco Bell vicodin and steaks and Jason Momoa and Bible man at the end crash-landing into a shopping mall and having their epic fight they're sure like little touches like that where you you wink wink at at the subject matter because it's so silly Mike not every superhero movie should be Marvel film you will need to take some of these more seriously we'll have you out in a second I'm sure a whole bunch of CGI artists got paid to meticulously animate a giant battle that I close my eyes to what could be greater than a king a hero so Jay what you reckon about an Aquaman oh no no oh yeah I would say no stay away from Aquaman unless you're the hardest of hardcore DC fans that needs to soak up all of their cannon lightning-fast QPR repair or shot how can I help you oh you're looking to have your qbr repaired why we do that sir come on in we're open 24/7 coming at 4:30 in the morning what an unexpected turn of events [Music]

Channel: RedLetterMedia

Views: 1,658,255

Keywords: redlettermedia, red letter media, red, letter, media, plinkett, half in the bag, mike stoklasa, jay bauman, rich evans, aquaman, dc comics, dceu

Id: YU3QGyBY5-c

Length: 32min 30sec (1950 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Supermunch2000]

This month has been the greatest month in the history of all of RedLetterMedia - an embarrassment of riches!

[u/[deleted]]

"They should call this deep sea exposition"

You just keep hitting those home runs Jay

[u/MakotoTruth]

That bit about Ocean Master wanting cotton candy is pretty funny to me cause that kinda happens in one of the comics. Aquaman is trying to show surface world culture to some Atlanteans solders and he does this by taking them to a fair and giving them cotton candy which they react like its crack.

[u/DamAndBlast]

Is Jay's camera with a shallow depth of field replacing Jay's camera with a deep depth of field?

[u/HAHA_goats]

I was hoping they'd surprise everyone and make Aquaman a live action Sealab 2021.

[u/Fr0styF0ster]

You didn’t notice the Star Trek reference, but your brain did.

[u/Tarlcabot18]

These are REAL shots from a REAL movie.

[u/vocalviolence]

Good episode. Wouldn't add a thing except maybe a doughy Milwaukee city official with vast comic book knowledge.

[u/Maverick916]

CHRISTMAS MIRACLE

A new HITB. Feels like its been a long time