LEGO DC Superheroes: Aquaman Rage of Atlantis 2018

I’m continuing my Aquaman month here by watching yet another Aquaman movie, this time around I’m watching the animated LEGO movie that featured Aquaman last year. I’ve seen several of these animated LEGO movies and they’re all pretty similar to each other. They’re not quite as funny or impressive as the theatrical LEGO movies, but they have a similar humor and they also seem to introduce a fair number of lesser known DC comics characters which is always fun for someone like me who doesn’t have an in depth knowledge of the comics. This movie also starts off with the premise that Aquaman is a pretty useless superhero but by the end, the team accepts him. It’s pretty much the same quality as the other LEGO home video releases. It’s fun, but it’s not extraordinary.

Similar to the LEGO Flash movie, this starts off with Aquaman having a bit of a big head to himself. The big difference is that while Flash was extremely confident in his abilities, he also was very competent in his abilities. Here, at least once he’s out of the water and mistakenly goes to fight a crime in a dry lake bed, Aquaman is pretty incompetent fighting against Lobo. And once he’s a laughing stock and has to be saved by the rest of the Justice League, he’s also put in his place once he returns to Atlantis by his half brother Ocean Master with the help of the Red Lantern Atrocitus.

The villain’s plot is that Atrocitus uses his Red Lantern ring which is the power of anger and rage to make all the Atlanteans fall under the control of their rage which is turned specifically against Aquaman and the surface dwellers. Atrocitus and Ocean Master have a deal that Orm will control the oceans while Atrocitus will control everyone on dry land. Meanwhile, Atrocitus is planning on double crossing Ocean Master to take control of the entire Earth himself while draining the Oceans out into space to leave Ocean Master to be king of nothing. There’s a bit of planet hopping and working together so that everything works out in the end as expected.

One of the best and worst decisions this movie makes is while it’s an Aquaman movie, they also use this movie to introduce a new Green Lantern Jessica Cruz. And while it’s admirable to give time to one of the few female superheroes out there, the difficulty is how they present her. She’s brand new to the Justice League so she’s a little green, but the movie takes it a little bit too far and makes her extremely incompetent as she messes up nearly everything she does in the first two thirds of the movie. And this is made worse because she also has a sentient Green Lantern ring who also seems to be scoring her for some reason, and usually uses that as an excuse to subtly put her down by giving her negative Green Lantern points. She does eventually learn to be confident in herself and saves the day in the end, but it takes way too long to get there.

It’s helped a little bit by the fact that while Jessica Cruz is incompetent, everyone still believes in her and her abilities. And on top of that, Aquaman is basically treated the exact same way as he initially makes mistakes but ends up helping the team despite not being underwater for the majority of the film. Of course, one of the ways that he helps the team is when they’re stuck in the middle of the desert, he becomes comatose and immobile to become a human divining rod to point the team towards an alien bar above an underground water resevoir.

Where this film has the most fun is with some of the jokes about and surrounding Aquaman as well as some of the other lesser known villains. The majority of the Justice League end up fighting a cat Red Lantern named Dex-Starr and his rage-controlled sidekick and friend of Lobo who is a space dolphin named Fishy. It’s silly, it’s weird, but it falls right in line with anything else these LEGO movies have done before. And it’s all wrapped up with a touch of a lesson both with Jessica Cruz having to believe in herself and her abilities, as well as Aquaman having to reign in his ego a touch but also believe in his abilities outside of the ocean. It’s often difficult to talk about these movies here as they are so similar to each other outside of their individual plots. The animation is similar, the humor is similar, and they even all generally have similar moral lessons to them. But they’re all also fun to watch and entertaining, especially to get some of that background lesser known comic book characters. There’s nothing wrong with them, but especially if you have kids or you enjoy the LEGO style humor they’re always worth a watch. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.