Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Extra, Extra!: Aquaman Unites the Seven

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

With everything Marvel going on right now - the new Age of Ultron trailer, The Spectacular Spider-Man getting a director, multiple new Age of Ultron posters - it's easy to forget that Zack Snyder recently shared an exciting new poster for Batman vs Superman.  Featuring Jason Momoa's Aquaman, it declares a message of unity amidst inter-heroic conflict.
The first thing that I hear people bring up when talking about this poster - other than the fact that Kahl Drogo Curry looks like he'd be more likely to rip your spine out than bring warring factions of superheroes together - is his outfit.  Most people seem to be complaining that it looks gray and washed-out: a continuation of the out of place Dark Knight aesthetic that seems to be creeping into every one of DC's live action movies.

And while the visual darkness of the images coming out of DC these days is cause for some concern, this image is not.  Whereas people call it gray, I call it silver (or at least sylvan).  Where they call it washed-out, I call it regal.  I see a king armed for battle, not the punching bad of the Justice League.
His outfit in the released image looks genuinely awesome, a testament to the fact that they're going for the more rugged, battle-hardened Aquaman from the Justice League tv series than the more common "butt of every superhero joke ever" version.  Another thing to keep in mind is that this is a production photo, not a movie still.  There's nothing saying that this is what he'll be wearing into battle in the movies.  In fact, this was probably released as a means of gauging popular opinion on the matter.

My personal hope is that they update his traditionally orange outfight into something reasonably similar to this image.  I want to see Aquaman in bronze-enameled scale mail: not all that dissimilar from his recent appearance in Justice League: Throne of Atlantis.
It also appears that Aquaman has a larger role to play in the DCCU than I initially thought.  Superman has seemingly always occupied the "Captain America role" in the Justice League - the moral center who brings them together and gives them an ideal to strive towards.  That is evidently not the case here, where the seasoned politics and level-headed reasoning of Aquaman win out against Superman's boyscout earnestness.  In an interesting shift for DC, Superman seems to be just one of the guys, rather than the symbolic head of the League.

What do you want Aquaman to look like in his DC Cinematic Universe debut?

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