Fans at San Diego Comic-Conn 2018 were treated to new exclusive footage from “Aquaman” Saturday at the very end of the Warner Bros. Hall H panel. But we did say exclusive, so you won’t see it online anytime soon.
Luckily we were there — so here’s what we saw in the footage, which expanded on the hero’s quest to protect the worlds of the depths and of the surface.
The footage starts with Aquaman, a.k.a. Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa), talking about his parents in an extended version of what fans saw in the first “Aquaman” trailer released earlier Saturday. Arthur’s father was a human lighthouse keeper who saved his mother, the queen of Atlantis. The two fell in love and had Arthur, who bridges the world beneath the ocean and the land. One day, his mother hopes, he’ll return to Atlantis to lead his people.
Next, the video cut to the Sahara Desert — definitely not a great place for a guy called Aquaman to find himself. Arthur and Mera (Amber Heard), his fellow Atlantean, march across the dunes, and Arthur remarks that there’s no way something from Atlantis could be so far inland. He’s wrong, though, and the pair soon find themselves in a strange ruin.
Inside, they find an ancient device. Mera inserts some kind of cylinder that she was carrying into it, but after a beat, nothing happens. Arthur remarks that the place has been ruins since before the Sahara was a desert. Mera, realizing the place was once underwater, wipes some sweat from Arthur’s face and uses the moisture to activate the machine, causing it to glow with a blue light.
A hologram of an old Atlantean king tells them about a goal of uniting the surface world with the ocean world, and explains that the key to doing so is a powerful trident. The message ends and Mera smashes the cylinder to hide the message from anyone else, saying she memorized its information. When she asks Arthur if he memorized it too, he says, “Yeah — it was something something trident.”
Next, Arthur and Mera are chased through a desert city by the movie’s villain, Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who uses powerful red lasers to try to cut the heroes down. The pair get separated as Manta’s red-clad minions chase Mera, smashing through buildings while she sprints across the rooftops above. The sequence ends as the two barely escape Black Manta, with Arthur remarking, “That was awesome.”
Finally, the video wraps up with voice-over from Mera and Arthur. “Atlantis has always had a king. Now we need something more,” Mera tells him.
“What’s mightier than a king?” Arthur asks.
“A hero,” she tells him, and the footage ends with a shot of Aquaman in his classic yellow armor.