From the opening frame of Atlantis: Reign of Atlan (2026), director James Wan plunges us into a mythic past where ocean and land were once bound by a single throne. This is no mere prelude to the Aquaman saga; it is a full-blooded epic that stands on its own, painting the grandeur and downfall of the greatest kingdom ever to rise from the seas. The film carries the weight of myth while pulsing with the urgency of a modern blockbuster.
At the center is Gerard Butler’s King Atlan, a man of vision and conviction, commanding both authority and empathy. Butler imbues the role with equal parts fire and sorrow, shaping Atlan into a leader torn between his duty to his people and the insatiable pull of forbidden power. He is no flawless hero; he is a man whose ambition both builds and destroys, and Butler’s performance lingers long after the credits roll.
Gal Gadot shines as Queen Lyanna, the luminous heart of Atlantis. Her performance grounds the mythic spectacle with human warmth, portraying a woman who sees the shadow creeping into her husband’s soul yet fights to preserve their kingdom’s light. Lyanna is not a passive figure; she is a queen with agency, courage, and grace, her every choice underscored by a quiet desperation to protect both her family and her people.
And then there is Eva Green as Morganna, the sea-sorceress whose dark seduction coils around the throne like a serpent. Green’s performance is a masterclass in restraint and menace, her voice a velvet whisper that drips with danger. She does not merely tempt Atlan with magic — she awakens in him the hunger for transcendence, for dominion beyond even what a king should dream. Morganna is both a lover and an omen, her presence an inexorable tide pulling Atlantis toward its doom.
The film’s scale is breathtaking. Wan’s Atlantis is rendered in impossible beauty: crystalline towers lit by bioluminescent veins, streets alive with sea creatures, palaces that shimmer like living coral. The magical technology of the Atlanteans feels both wondrous and inevitable, bridging fantasy and science with elegant plausibility. Yet the spectacle is always in service of the story — the grandeur of Atlantis is shown not as eternal glory but as fragile magnificence, destined to fracture.
When war comes, it is staged with operatic intensity. Ocean tribes clash in colossal battles that ripple across waves and depths, tridents sparking with otherworldly energy. Wan balances the chaos of war with moments of intimate focus: the clash of blades echoing through the silence of the deep, a single figure falling into the abyss, the slow collapse of a city under its own hubris. Each action sequence is infused with mythic weight, as though the ocean itself mourns the coming cataclysm.
The heart of the tragedy lies not in the fall of a kingdom, but in the erosion of love and trust. Atlan and Lyanna’s relationship, once the foundation of peace, crumbles under the corrosive influence of ambition. The betrayal feels personal, not merely political, and the film forces us to watch as devotion turns into distance, and distance into loss. This emotional decay mirrors the physical collapse of Atlantis, giving the story its mythic resonance.
What makes Atlantis: Reign of Atlan stand apart from other mythological epics is its embrace of inevitability. From the first whisper of the Trident’s power, the audience knows where the story must end. The brilliance lies in the journey — in how every choice, every temptation, every silence builds toward the drowning of a kingdom. The film doesn’t shock with the fact of Atlantis’s fall; it devastates with the truth that its fall was written the moment Atlan reached for power beyond his grasp.
The score, composed by Rupert Gregson-Williams, swells with choral majesty and aching lament, echoing both the triumph and tragedy of a world too beautiful to last. The cinematography captures Atlantis in hues of sapphire and gold, shifting to darker tones as the corruption spreads. By the final act, the glowing city has become a funeral pyre beneath the waves, a haunting image that sears itself into memory.
As the waters rise and the empire drowns, Wan delivers a finale both catastrophic and poetic. It is not simply the destruction of a city — it is the death of a dream, the moment myth becomes legend, and legend becomes loss. The last images of Atlan, his trident sinking with him into the abyss, embody the tragedy of a king who gave his people everything… and then took it all away.
With a rating of 9.3/10, Atlantis: Reign of Atlan is mythic, majestic, and profoundly tragic. It is the rare prequel that enhances its successor by standing tall on its own. Before there was Aquaman, there was Atlan — and his story is not one of triumph, but of hubris, heartbreak, and the ocean’s eternal memory. This is not just the fall of a kingdom. It is the birth of a legend.
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