{Spoiler: Click to show}1) Overall it was fine, a solid B. The special effects were the high point, especially the fluorescent sea life. The sea dragon steeds looked great, as did the kracken thingy.

2) I was distracted by how derivative the plot was of Black Panther (isolated super-country debates attacking the rest of the world; two duels between king and an outside claimant to the throne; good guy loses the first duel but wins the second one, aided by sympathetic royal court members and advanced weaponry). Plus of course the Arthurian angle, which I expected, and a Numenorean origin for Atlantis, which I did not. (I know Numenor was based on Atlantis anyway, but the whole "the island sank into the sea due to scientific hubris" was straight out of The Silmarillion.) The take-home message was "if you have to duel someone, be sure to bring a superior weapon and to hold the duel in an environment in which your opponent has zero experience living, let alone fighting." P.S. wouldn't lava make the underwater arena an unviewable mass of steam and bubbles and scalding water?

3) Amber Heard got plenty to do. I was a bit distracted by how much they were trying to make her look and act like Scarlett Johannson. But it was fun to see Temuera Morrison as Arthur's dad, also tacitly justifying Arthur's Moana tattoos as a Maori thing. Nicole Kidman was barely recognizable under the botox. I didn't recognize Dolph Lundgren either. Getting Julie Andrews to voice the kraken was hilarious. I did a spit-take when I saw her name in the credits.

4) The script was uninspired, lacking in originality. My son and I had a little game of saying the next line of dialogue before the characters did; that's how cliche it was. Few jokes, and the desert treasure hunt, while clearly intended to evoke Indiana Jones, lacked the prickly brio of Indy and Marion and just seemed forced. (Except for Arthur's comment about peeing on the device. That was funny and in-character.)

5) The main character we saw was not well justified by the origin story they gave. He was raised by his blue collar dad but also got regular visits from the Merlin-like royal vizier of Atlantis, to train him in aquatic power and melee combat. Did his dad know about that? How could he not? Arthur made a reference to "gods" just before the final combat. But surely his human dad didn't raise him as a polytheist, nor does religion seem to be a huge part of Atlantean life, so that line came out of nowhere. Apparently Arthur is some sort of maritime blue collar dude who hangs out in biker bars, drinking beer in the morning and watching TV. (The dialogue bit that rang true was when he admitted that he only knew Pinocchio from the movie, not the book.) They missed all sorts of opportunity for "princess vs the uncouth street kid" tensions.

They hit a bit on the environmental thing with the "Atlantis is mad because humans strew the oceans with trash." But they missed a big opportunity for Arthur to empathize with his people about this, and we never see any actual ill consequences to Atlantean society, far beneath the garbage-laden waves.

A better story would have been something like this: Arthur owns a fishing boat that, due to his fish telepathy powers, is able to do incredibly well at collecting fish -- so good that although he's getting rich, he is inadvertently disrupting the ecological balance of Cape Cod. (Which, as the name implies, had an incredible abundance of fish there in the 1600s. Read Mark Kurlansky's book "Cod" sometime.) Algae starts overgrowing, and Atlanteans start getting sick and dying. To save themselves, the Atlanteans begin a series of increasingly forceful strikes against fishing industry targets around the world, ultimately including Arthur's own boat. Lives are lost. Arthur goes on a mission of revenge, then discovers that he's partially culpable for the suffering of the people whom he has rejected. Then unfolds some version of the "should we attack the surface world?" plot seen in the movie, but the Atlanteans are far better motivated, and Arthur far more conflicted, torn between the values of his two societies.

6) They also whiffed the opportunity to meaningfully connect this film to the other DC films. The tsunami attack was a golden opportunity to see a little bit of Superman. It could have been as much as "Superman lifts the grounded destroyer off of the town's waterfront and then discusses the problem with Arthur" or as little as a blur in the distance on TV, averting some element of the catastrophe. Either way, the Cinematic DCU would have been enriched.