Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (Spoilers)

Short version: It should have been called Aquaman and the Time I Lost Watching This Dreck.

I feel bad for putting the spoilers warning up because it assumes enough people will go to watch it when I know they already aren't (if, at least, the less-than-a-dozen-people in our theater this afternoon is any gauge).
 
The story itself was pretty uninspired, you could glean more than enough from the trailers to understand the plot and then guess the ending. Manta returns to kill Aquaman, finds some sort of power to enhance himself in some way to be able to do this, Aquaman has a child now so the child is going to be threatened, Aquaman defeats Manta and saves his baby.

...and that's pretty much what we get. Toss in some global wa... err... "climate change" fear-mongering (along with the plot-logic-fail of how Antarctica became an ice sheet only because of magic and that was somehow not a catastrophe which impacted all life on the planet, but "climate change" melting it is), some buddy-movie'ing (because Oram wasn't really a bad guy, right?) and the obligatory comic-relief-pet-friend-thing and you have the movie.

The "rousing" speech he gives at the end of the movie ends with what I could only describe as an attempt to badly parody Tony Stark's "I am Iron Man" moment from the first Iron Man movie. And it worked about as well as a steel balloon.

I don't know how many here are old enough to remember when Conan O'Brien was doing Late Night on NBC back in the 90's, but he would have "Bill Clinton" on. "Bill" was just a headshot of Bill Clinton on a TV monitor with the mouth cut out and someone else's mouth would be super-imposed over it( LINK). That person (who was off-stage) would converse with Conan (and it was usually pretty damned funny). The scenes in this Aquaman movie where they are underwater... it looked like their faces were super-imposed over CGI heads in the same way. Some of the CGI was good, but these scenes were pretty much all poorly crafted.

Don't even bother watching this for free if it ever goes to a streaming service you subscribe to.