One of Hollywood’s latest Blockbusters, Aquaman featuring Jason Momoa and Amber Heard is what you might expect from a big-budget high-octane action movie. And it certainly delivers in that regard as over $1 billion in gross sales would indicate.
An unlikely feature of this movie is a surprising global message that you might not expect out of the capitalist corporations that make up the movie-making business of Southern California.
The well justified and documented issue of oceanic pollution is not lost in this movie and in fact, is quite prominent in some scenes and lines from these Hollywood stars.
The premise of the film is our hero Aquaman, the heir to the sub aquatic kingdom of Atlantis, must step forward to lead his people against his half brother, Orm, who seeks to unite the seven kingdoms against the surface world. In one scene, this character Orm orchestrates numerous tidal waves that come crashing down on multiple city coastlines. Enmeshed in these waves are decades worth of waste, garbage and trash that the people of ‘the surface world’ have been depositing in the oceans and slowly poisoning life under the sea. He also included, for good measure, numerous giant pollutants such as sunken warships and submarines that have been abandoned at the bottom of the sea. A note not only to pollution but also to the forgotten dumping ground of war.
Even though we are looking at the re-creation of a comic book character in film. When you see the scenes in the movie where thousands of tons of garbage and waste that were deposited in the oceans and are now strewn across our beaches and canvas miles of splashing waves upon our coastal shores. This along with towering mountains of rubbish on the outskirts of cities with giant derelict war vessels that have been dragged from the deep and thrown back on to land for all to witness. It is hard not to see the similarities with actual footage of mass oceanic pollution that is becoming an all too familiar sight on our screens and newsfeed.
If you can imagine a world where the surfaces under the sea were to be inhabited. Alternatively if you are not feeling that imaginative, just think of a proposed global project to clean up all the pollution from our seas. What would that look like and where would we put it? Where would we put an estimated 14 billion pounds of garbage that gets dumped into our oceans every year (National Academy of Sciences). That is greater than 1.5 million pounds per hour. We have ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, a collection of plastic, floating trash halfway between Hawaii and California, that has grown to more than 600,000 square miles, a study found. That is twice the size of Texas.
I am sure plans could be drawn up to have this trash flown out into space and released. No inter-galactic garbage police to stop us and apparently there is infinite space up there. We could direct them towards some black holes, and it would simply disappear, job done (the late Stephen Hawking might be sorry he ever discovered them). And just like under the sea, it would be out of sight and out of mind. Could space be our new ocean, our next dumping ground? After all, the ‘clean our ocean’ campaigns have thankfully built sufficient global concern and traction that they are not going away but in the absence of not choosing and adopting a better way of living, hopefully it is not just another ‘landfill’ or indeed ‘space fill’ we are looking for.
In another scene from the movie, our leading lady ‘Mera’ (who lives under the sea) challenges Aquaman (who was raised on land) with the fact that the ‘surface world dwellers’ have directed sewers into the oceans, created mountains made of trash, have factories that belch out filth and melt the ice caps. He in turn, having of course no argument against these points, reminds her that yes, there are indeed some ‘idiots running the show’ but not to forget the green forests, big mountains and beautiful lakes.
While it certainly is important to remind ourselves of the positive and beautiful aspects of our planet. We also cannot be blind to the fact that we are not producing or growing any more giant forests, mountains or lakes, but we are producing enough garbage to cover them many times over. And if you don’t believe me, then hopefully you might believe Aquaman!

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