Descriptive Audio Review: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

Not so much a standard movie review as it is documenting the experience of using descriptive audio to consume a movie. If you didn’t know, descriptive audio uses a voiceover narration to describe onscreen action for visually impaired users. It ends up being a lot like a radio drama, but don’t make that comparison within earshot of someone from the Silent Generation unless you want to be airdropped into the Pacific.

I wanted to make sure I listened to a movie I never saw before, and one that had a lot of action and unusual things that needed description, to really test how audio description would work. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom fit the bill, even though I had no desire to see (or hear) it in the first place. It’s still streaming on Tubi, and it didn’t do well at the box office so I predict it will languish on the free streaming services for a while.

Here are some disconnected observations.

• I had to resist the urge to look at the screen whenever a weird creature or something confused me. When you hear “octobots,” “mechanical sharks,” “hammerhead shark thugs,” or “a mollusk woman sings,” a visual person—just about most of us—want to take a gander. The urge was pretty powerful the first 30 minutes or so, until I resigned myself to this fate.
• Two of the actors, Jason Momoa and Randall Park, had distinct voices, and even secondary characters with small parts done by well-known actors I could recognize, like Martin Short. There was a lot of dialogue between Aquaman and his brother, Orm, played by Patrick Wilson, and their voices were too similar to me to keep track of all the time. I’m sure someone who regularly consumed media audio-only wouldn’t have as much trouble as I did.
• There were a couple of times the narration took me out of the story, especially when there was text actually on the screen. The narration went: “Text appears: ‘Atlantis'”, or “Text appears: ‘Somewhere in the South Pacific'”. There are much more effective ways of communicating the same thing without being to metatextual. Narration like “Meanwhile, in Atlantis…” would be an easy fix. This may be a normal-sighted shortcoming, because I immediately conjured a picture in my head when I heard the narration. Someone who never had sight wouldn’t have that “problem”.
• I was taken out of the story, again, near the end, when there was a montage of news anchors talking. The narration was “Various newscasts play,” which felt too literal of a description. You could say something like “All around the world, people are talking about Atlantis,” or some such. Maybe there were enough context clues for non-sighted users to know they’re listening to broadcast news reports.
• Similarly, the stylized montage of DC Comics characters in the beginning had just okay narration, though it was described too literally. “Rippling as if underwater, CGI animation shows Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman,…” and so forth. You could have narration that would depict what this was doing for visual users, like: “Welcome to DC Comics: Batman, the Dark Knight; Superman, the Kryptonian; Wonder Woman, Queen of the Amazon;…” etc. Yes, an audio-only user wouldn’t know what was on screen, but he would receive the intended meaning of the introduction.
• There was a cockroach eating scene that reminded me of the importance of sound design.
• There was a line of narration that described an animal as an “albatross-sized insect”. Would that be meaningful to a non-sighted user, who might not know how large an albatross is, especially in relation to insects?
• An example of effective narration, where pieces of a weapon were being formed. It was something short, like, “The trident pieces fuse together”, and then there was a bunch of sound demonstrating the fusing, very loud and staccato. The narration could’ve been overdone (“Broken pieces quiver and slam together to form a trident”) but you could piece things together (haha) from the audio and get a good picture (haha again) of what the scene looked like.

If you’re wondering about the actual story, it was a paint-by-numbers superhero yarn. The DCCU’s Atlantis is discount-bin Wakanda and Lost Kingdom cribbed a lot of the same elements from both Black Panther movies. Not recommended.