Aquaman (Gordon Goodman) was born exactly when his parents died in an
accident, driving their car into the sea. Rather surprisingly, the boy not
only survived but was saved by dolphins who brought him up, which is why
he now understands dolphin language and is able to swim and dive like ...
well, like a dolphin. Nowadays, he's a mild-mannered marine biologist, but
in his secret identity, he is also a superhero, Aquaman, who fights mostly
sea-related crime. And right about now, the world needs a sea-related
superhero, because supervillain the Angler (Steve Dewinter) threatens to
dry up the Pacific Ocean if he's not paid $24 million - which doesn't
sound like too good a deal because I think even in the eighties putting an
operation into action to dry up the Pacific Ocean would have cost way more
than $24 million. Anyways, Aquaman soon finds out where the Angler
resides, waterskies there on his dolphin parents (really), and takes out
the Angler's gang pretty much single-handedly. However, the Angler has
done a bit of a background check on Aquaman, has found out that he is in a
relationship with fellow marine biologist Katie King (Linda Phillips), and
has taken her hostage. And with her in his hand, it's pretty easy for him
to trap Aquaman, too. Will Aquaman escape? How am I to know, the film
ends here and was never given a sequel. Not an official Aquaman-adaptation
but rather a student film, this low budget short is rather an ambitious
project, featuring much marine action and underwater photography, and it
tries to remain as faithful as possible to its comicbook roots - but truth
to be told, it's far from a perfect or even good film: Sure, it shows
ambition, but it also shows little hindsight, thus a rather silly and
simplistic plot that might work as a comicbook is translated to the screen
pretty much one-to-one, without any badly-needed irony, but also without a
proper pacing or buildup of suspense. And the directorial effort remains
disappointingly flat, even stagey, throughout, and shows next to no
cinematic flair or such. Rather disappointing, actually.
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