- H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” makes an early appearance, foreshadowing some Cthulhu-inspired creatures our hero will first fight and then command. Sadly, the (very!) big baddie in Dunwich is Yog-Sothoth, not Cthulhu, so this also foreshadows a movie that has some good ideas but doesn’t quite get them all right.
- One thing it did get right was a spectacular chase scene on the rooftops of Sicily that reminded me of the best moments of Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted. This is also one of the few places where the setting wasn’t obviously CGI (because it wasn’t).
- Seriously, if your budget is $160,000,000 you should either just film a real sunset or have an obviously fake one as a statement. It looked like most above-ground scenes were shot in the Uncanny Valley.
- William Defoe is a lifelong resident of the Uncanny Valley, no matter the movie.
- Nicole Kidman has a good fight scene. The fight scenes in general were easy to follow and nicely choreographed.
- Dolph Lundgren, huh? Good casting there, but I was hoping he’d have a nice fight as well
- Jason Momoa can’t pull off the dumb muscle look they were going for at the beginning and the smartass one-liners don’t help. So his character’s arc is in costume more than psyche: shirtless, street clothes, Aquaman.
- Speaking of which, that Aquaman costume came fresh off a corpse that had been simmering in the deep sea for millennia. But we already established that Aquaman had bad b.o. so that made it fine I guess?
- The underwater villain was entirely predictable and boring. The human baddie was delightful and I look forward to seeing more of him and his equally delightful new companion in the sequel.
- Nutshell review: Predictable but delightfully over-the-top. Directed by James Wan, 2018