After Carrying Aquaman, Both Amber Heard and Mera Deserved Better from Lost Kingdom

In the short, fraught life of the now-ended DCEU, the successful films within the franchise can be counted on a single hand, and an even smaller pool amongst those successful outings are those that actually did well at the box office. A rare movie in the cross-section of that depressingly barren Venn diagram is 2018’s Aquaman. The film became a billion-dollar box office success and a crowd-pleaser, lauded as a Shakespearean tale with action sequences elevating a superhero franchise too often dominated by bland choreography and predictable fights. But for myself and many others, Aquaman’s eternal charm didn’t just stem from its ocean-spanning romp or its action-filled adventure, but from the character and relationship at the heart of the film: Amber Heard’s Mera and the connection she shared with Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry. 

Across their globe-trotting journey, the dynamic between Mera and Arthur was the spark that made Aquaman work the first time around, creating the momentum that propelled the original film to its massive box office success. Mera’s connection to Atlantean culture and customs, alongside her more serious nature, grounded Arthur’s cluelessness and immaturity. Aquaman’s best fight sequences are elevated by Mera’s presence (who could possibly forget that wine-bending scene and the rooftop fights?), and the emotional stakes rest within her belief that Arthur can be the king Atlantis deserves. When Aquaman fades to black, Arthur and Mera’s future is perfectly clear on the horizon ahead: Marriage, politics, babies, danger—they would face it all, and they would face it all together. 

A sequel to such a delightful film was perfectly teed up. There was no other way to move forward with Aquaman than to double down on his familial connections to his Atlantean mother and his surface-dweller father, and the progression of his relationship with the woman who would soon become his queen. But then the summer of 2022 happened, and everything changed. 

If you were on the internet between April and June of 2022, you will recall in vivid detail the circus that was the defamation trial between Amber Heard and her ex-husband, Johnny Depp. Featuring weaponized nostalgia for Depp’s culturally beloved film roles alongside Daily Wire-funded Depp propaganda across social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, viral and heartless skits on TikTok, and even a sensationalized, Lifetime-esque docuseries on the subject, the trial dominated our cultural conversation throughout that summer, hammering home the scary reality of this new form of weaponized cultural abuse on such a grand scale—and just how gleefully society will tear down a woman when given explicit permission. Even without the notes from Heard’s therapist (which were released upon payment to the court from Depp disciples after the trial), Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is visibly disjointed, a flaw that reeks of one thing: Amber Heard’s Mera was purposefully all but cut from this film. 

In the beginning of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Arthur tells the audience that he is a new father, and the film showcases everything that comes with it: He changes diapers, he tells his son stories of his grand adventures and he falls asleep with his baby in his arms. 

The only issue is that Arthur also has a wife who is, you know, the mother of this baby who ultimately becomes the lynchpin of the film. Besides a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it water birth scene and a tiny (but still adorable) moment where Mera uses her water-bending power to hit Arthur with their son’s pee stream, she is almost entirely absent from the film’s establishment of this new Curry family. Her name is barely uttered, and even when it is, the film quickly moves to change the subject. It’s an awkward dance that results in the equivalent of the Streisand Effect on film. When Arthur is doing fatherly duties, Mera is somehow always off-screen dealing with Atlantean business that she must pop in briefly to inform him of; when Arthur is at the focal point of the world’s stage at the end of the film, Mera is nowhere to be found, despite being the Queen of Atlantis. Director James Wan and Warner Bros.’ attempts to erase Mera do nothing but cripple the film’s pacing and emotional core, drawing even more attention to the absence of heart within Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. 

In stark contrast to her original role, Mera is not allowed to be a fully-formed character in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Instead, she is reduced to the vessel that brought Arthur’s son into the world, disappearing into a shadow at the edges of her own life as her injury early in the film and third-act reappearance do little to offer any kind of character development or growth. She is never allowed to be the fierce and kind Mera we knew, but instead simply: Mother, Wife, Queen, Victim, awkwardly shifting depending on what the film needs her to be at any moment. She has no agency outside of those bounds, and no context within the film itself of a life lived outside of her relationship to Arthur, their son Junior, her people, and the film’s cartoonish villain. She is only called upon to have a baby on her hip, to be a pawn for Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to use to hurt Arthur, and for Arthur to use as motivation to save the world. They may as well have just fridged her. 

In both of the two emotional moments offered to Mera throughout the entirety of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’s two-hour runtime, she is never even allowed the luxury of a close-up. When she calls for her son after Black Manta kidnaps him from their now-burning home on the beach, she is shot in nothing closer than a medium-wide as Momoa’s flat performance lingers, extremely close and in slow motion. And when Mera finally is able to grab Junior from the clutches of those that wish to do him harm, their emotional reunion is anything but. The scene awkwardly omits a reaction shot, simply lingering on the baby’s face as we stare at the fiery red hair on the back of Mera’s head. Even in what should have been the film’s biggest emotional moment—not only for Mera, but for the movie’s lead character—Arthur, Mera and Junior share a hug for what feels like 0.2 seconds before we are granted long reaction shots of Orm (Patrick Wilson) and even Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park’s scientist with a puzzlingly outsized role in this film), for some reason. Arthur almost just lost his son to a ritual sacrifice and his wife nearly lost her life trying to save him, but we are only allotted a few frames before cutting away. The fear of leaving Heard on screen long enough to get a non-blurry screenshot of her standing next to the revamped DCU’s potential Lobo is palpable throughout, but especially in those stunted emotional beats. 

It’s these “look over here, not over there!” hoops that bog this film down, removing everything that made Aquaman so special in the first place. And through the erasure of Mera, the film’s lead character suffers nearly as much. The first film was, at its heart, a duel love story between Arthur and Mera, and Arthur’s parents: Nicole Kidman’s Atlanna and Temuera Morrison’s Tom. But Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom relegates Arthur’s family to the background in their botched cutting job. Atlanna is nearly as absent as Mera, and besides some appearances at the beginning and end of the film, Arthur’s father is forgotten in the shuffle. Dr. Shin takes unprecedented importance, overshadowing the lead’s wife, child, mother and father. This shift sucks the life out of Aquaman, both as a film franchise and as a character. The charm of Aquaman lived within that relationship between Arthur and Mera, within Arthur’s struggles to find a home between the land and the sea, and within the importance of family in a world filled with heartache. Instead, as Dr. Shin and Black Manta bicker or Dr. Shin says an offensively predictable scientist line to no one but the captive audience of this lackluster sequel, Arthur becomes nothing more than a caricature of Momoa-esque coolness with freaky contacts, wrapped in a beautiful orange and green suit that is truly wasted on a film that flattens its central character until he dissolves in the water. 

The most depressing thing about Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is that there is a decent and enjoyable sequel buried in the pile of scenes left on the cutting room floor. When the film isn’t cutting away from her mid-battle, Mera is a revelation, just as she was in the first movie. Heard’s performance with water-bending alone is masterful; in a devastatingly short scene, Mera hurls waves at the undead army, and the tangible weight behind her movements and the grace with which they are still beautifully and brutally carried out is one of the few lean-in moments this film manages—and it’s over in an instant. In her two heavy emotional beats, Heard truly shines, conveying heartbreaking grief and anger in the few fleeting frames she’s granted. And when Mera and Arthur are briefly allowed to playfully interact as they did in the original film, that chemistry sparks life into this otherwise painfully dull adventure. In an effort to erase Heard from Aquaman and its legacy, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom highlights how easy it is for her to command the screen, how integral Mera is to Arthur’s effectiveness as a character, and how instrumental she was as the grounding force of the first film. 

The final product is a result of many unfortunate things: A superhero landscape that is no longer printing money, a Warner Bros. that seems to perpetually be on the verge of collapse, a DC Universe that is undergoing construction (more significantly than it previously was, at the very least) and, most of all, a publicly-supported hate campaign orchestrated to ruin a woman’s career, of which the studio, Wan and all those involved in this film are complicit. Mera’s stunted role in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the final public lashing for a woman who simply dared to speak out about the abuse she faced at the hands of an individual that she left unnamed in an op-ed. The erasure of Heard from this film is a disgrace, one that is only made worse by WBD’s rollout of The Flash earlier this year. After Ezra Miller’s reign of terror last summer, they were present at The Flash’s world premiere. 

More than anything, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and WBD treating Heard like radioactive waste while Miller enjoyed the luxury of a world premiere and an outsized promotional campaign exactly proves the point Heard made in her fateful op-ed. She wrote, “I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse,” and it’s difficult to ignore just how stunningly correct that statement still is. Heard has unfortunately had the rare vantage point of seeing this happen time and time again, where her fellow DCEU co-star can be accused of grooming and kidnapping (to name but a few misdeeds Miller allegedly partook in last summer) and still attend the premiere of their film, yet Heard is nearly erased from Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and entirely absent from any kind of promotional material—all for daring to share her experience with the vitriolic hate she received in the wake of her comparatively quiet separation from her now ex-husband. 

In its effort to erase both Mera and Heard from this film and Aquaman’s legacy, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom sunk its own ship. By choosing to do so, it put the final, sad nail in the coffin of the decade-long experiment that was DC’s attempt at the MCU’s success. The only thing left to say in the aftermath of all this carnage is simple: #ReleaseTheMeraCut. 

Anna Govert is the TV Editor of Paste Magazine. For any and all thoughts about TV, film, and her unshakable love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you can follow her @annagovert.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.