Aquaman director James Wan showed IGN and other members of the press roughly fifteen minutes of footage, and revealed more about the comics and films that inspired his upcoming DC comic book movie, during an edit bay visit at Warner Bros. in August.

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While I won't go into a blow-by-blow breakdown of the footage due to heavy spoilers, I will say that the footage showcased the film's colorful visual palette, the Romancing the Stone-esque nature of Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) and Mera's (Amber Heard) relationship, and more of the production and costume designs of Atlantis and its citizens.We were shown the movie's opening prologue, which depicts New England lighthouse keeper Tom Curry (Temuera Morrison) finnding Queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), nursing her back to health, and them falling in love, culminating with the birth of their son, Arthur. Atlanna, though, is a renegade from Atlantis so when white-armored Atlanteans with laser weapons show up to bring her home, she's forced to make a difficult choice that will affect her young son for the rest of his life."There’s the love story between Arthur and Mera, but for me, the love story between Mum and Dad is just as important," Wan said. "And the love story, Mum and Dad’s love story, to me, is the emotional backbone for the lead character, and what drives him for the rest of the movie, for the whole movie."James Wan also showed an extended sequence of Black Manta and his henchmen chasing Arthur and Mera through a Mediterranean village, Arthur dueling his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) for the throne of Atlantis, and Arthur and Mera's journey to the ruins of an ancient Atlantean temple to find out vital information on how to defeat Orm. The footage also revealed Easter eggs that are too fun to reveal here. Wan also showed the same extended sizzle reel that was only screened once before at this past summer's San Diego Comic-Con.In-between showing scenes, Wan spoke about some of his inspirations for the movie as well as developing the look and style of Aquaman. Wan said he wants his Aquaman movie to have "a lot of different flavors to it," from fantasy to action-comedy to horror. Wan cited influences as varied as the stop-motion monster movies of Ray Harryhausen and Toho's giant kaiju movies to '80s movies such as Romancing the Stone and Amblin productions like The Goonies.Wan described the tone of his film as "sort of action, swashbuckling adventure," adding, "I can be a little bit more poppy, a little bit more popcorny. But always kind of go, okay, I can also kind of lean this way, and kind of get a bit scary if I need be. Because again, the story and the world really lends itself to lots of different flavors. I always say the ocean is a really magical place, it’s full of wonder and magic, but it also can be very scary as well."In addition to Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis' New 52 run of Aquaman comics, Wan, a self-proclaimed "big fan of the Silver Age comic book of Aquaman," also cited Nick Cardy's run from the 1960s as well as Filmation's Aquaman animated series as influences. "I’m not gonna shy away from it, I wanna kind of embrace that, and kind of do my own version of that," Wan explained. "I just love that sort of, that retro quality that the original comic book had, and all of the sort of really fun characters. And try and find ways to fit them into the movie."Aquaman also offered Wan the chance to explore Atlantean society. "One of the things that I really wanna capture with the civilization of Atlantis is, it’s a bit of new and old as well. So we are familiar with the legend of Atlantis, right, that they’re such an advanced race of people, and culturally far ahead, but they became too good for their own good, right? Became too powerful for their own good. And they created something, and they sank as a result of that. And so, I took a lot of that sort of mythology and kind of played with it, and so even though now, Atlantis is a civilization underwater, and it’s been around for a long time, you know, hundreds of years. So they’re very technologically advanced, and sort of socially they’re very advanced, and yet in other ways they’re still very archaic. They still have a sort of monarch system that they’re very true to. And so, they have a very sort of … sort of rigid way of looking at things."As a fan of world creation and design, the director embraced the opportunity to design Atlantean civilization, both past and present. Wan explained that when Atlantis sank, the surviving Atlanteans "grew new Atlantis on top of it. So, structurally, I tried to imagine what construction underwater would look like. There would be no steel or wood or, you know, metal and stuff like that. So, conceptually, just thinking about how they would make their, build their buildings. And conceptually, the way that I think they would do that, like the way corals are made. They grow their corals. So buildings are grown like corals, and stuff like that."Wan added later, "The thing that I really like best about it, I get to create this sort of big, fantastical world, but it’s not like we’re going to visit this magical worlds that is [sic] in outer space, in another dimension. It’s taking place right here on Earth. And I think that’s the coolest thing. We’ve explored the ocean, so little of the ocean, we’ve explored space more than we’ve actually explored the ocean. And so the idea that there could be this, a massive civilization of beings, and other sort of race of people, is super exciting for me, and this movie really sort of touches on that.""Part of the fun about making this is they’re a race of underwater people, and they don’t usually come up here that much, right, and really, it’s partly because they don’t, they don’t like us. They don’t like what we represent, so they have no desire to come up here," Wan said. "They’re not accustomed to surface world sort of tradition, and they have their own tradition, and so I try to play into that a lot, especially between Arthur and Mera, between Jason’s character and Amber’s character. Jason is the fish out of water when he’s in Atlantis, and she’s the fish out of water when she’s on the surface world. And so they kind of have to work together, kind of have to get along, and, you know, things are weird over there, things are weird over here. And so - and part of that is where the fun comes from. So I try to touch a little bit on that without going too heavy.""There are seven kingdoms in the underwater world, and each kingdom, besides a handful of kingdoms where they look like normal humans, like you and I, but then there are other kingdoms where you’ve seen, in the trailer, there’s one where they’re just mer-people. And then there’s one kingdom, the Brine Kingdom, where they’re basically all giant crustaceans. They’re big crab men and women, big crab people. So I thought it would be fun to kind of lean into that. And then of course the other kingdom is the Trench, which are just these monsters. And obviously a lot of this is heavily inspired by what Geoff Johns did for the New 52. And it allows me to kind of create the different worlds, but it’s also ... just kind of a fun backdrop to set it against." He added, "It’s really about Arthur going through a hero’s journey, seeing all the different culture and kind of appreciating all the different people that are there, that he never kind of quite appreciated before."Aquaman swims into theaters December 21 in the US, December 14 in the UK, and December 13 in Australia. In the meantime, for more DC movies coverage, check out our reaction to Joaquin Phoenix's Joker makeup , our roundup of every first look at movie Jokers , and get the skinny on which actors are up for the Birds of Prey movie