Year: 2018

As 2018 draws to a close, China’s gaming industry — which has been beaten by a nine-month-long freeze in license approvals — woke up to exhilarating news as officials announced that they have started to review new titles again.

The much-coveted game licenses are essential for developers to legally monetize their work in China. “We’ve finished reviewing the first batch of games,” said Feng Shixin, a senior official from the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party, at an industry symposium on Friday. He added that the ideology watchdog will assign licenses at the soonest though there is a huge number of applications sitting in the pipeline.

Shares of Tencent, the country’s largest games publisher, jump 4 percent on Friday while its smaller competitor NetEase is up 1 percent.

China’s regulatory bodies for games stopped approving new titles since March as they underwent a major reshuffle that would eventually place the State Administration of Press and Publication under direct control of the propaganda organ. The shakeup is meant to give the central government more scrutiny over the billion-dollar market.

For one, regulators are looking to clamp down on illegal games that contains pornography, gambling, violence and content deemed inappropriate by Beijing, including titles that rewrite the history, according to Feng. In March, Tencent’s blockbuster mobile game Honor of Kings came under fire by the Communist Party’s official paper for misrepresenting certain historical Chinese figures.

Secondly, China is calling game developers to have “a stronger sense of social responsibility”, especially when it comes to protecting minors from addiction and illegal content. Beijing went as far as blaming video games for causing bad eyesight in children. In response, Tencent and NetEase among other major publishers have placed a time limit on underage players.

Regulators have also ordered studios to improve game quality and encouraged them to expand overseas. Local titles could be an engine to “promote Chinese culture, propagate Chinese values and showcase Chinese tastes” as they go global, said Feng.

The long halt in game approvals has taken a toll on the world’s largest gaming market. Chinese games are on way to generate $40 billion in revenues in 2018, according to market researcher Newzoo. However, the massive industry saw its slowest growth over the last ten years as it grew 5.4 percent year-over-year during the first half of 2018, according to a report by Beijing-based research firm GPC and China’s official gaming association CNG.

The world’s largest game publisher Tencent — also the developer behind China’s largest messenger WeChat — for instance, could not cash in on popular titles. The giant saw gaming revenues slip by four percent during the third quarter. To offset the pressure in its consumer-facing gaming business, Tencent went through a major reorganization in October to put more focus on enterprise services.

Tencent said during its Q3 earnings call that it had 15 games with monetization approval in its pipeline, which means that gaming revenues may get back on track when those games attain the desired licenses.

“This is clearly very encouraging news for China’s gaming industry,” Tencent said in a statement on Friday. “As the review and approval process for games resumes, we are confident that Tencent will be producing more compliant and higher-quality cultural work for society and the public.”

Smaller players may also have a chance to race ahead in the revived market. “The size of the gaming company does not matter. It matters how fast the company can be adapting to the new set of rules and guidelines,” said Ilya Gutov, business development director at APPTUTTi, a company that helps overseas games enter China.

“Having said so, larger companies have more resources to work out the compliance. However, they have more internal process to go through — they are not as flexible as small companies — so it’s really [a question of] how fast people can react to the new approval process.”

SoftBank’s Vision Fund is set to continue its recent spree of investments in Asian tech unicorns. The mega fund — which is targeted at $100 billion — is planning to invest upwards of $1 billion into Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing leader Grab, two sources with knowledge of the plan told TechCrunch. The investment could reach as much as $1.5 billion, one source added.

A SoftBank representative did not respond to a request for comment. Grab declined to comment.

The Vision Fund has made significant investments in three billion-dollar Asian companies in recent months. That includes backing India’s OYO as part of a $1 billion round (which included money from Grab) in September, writing a $2 billion check for Korea’s Coupang in November and co-leading a $1.2 billion round for Tokopedia in Indonesia alongside Alibaba earlier this month.

There is a pattern that SoftBank appears to be following here.

In all three cases, the Japanese company was an existing investor and, having transferred its stakes to the Vision Fund, it then doubled down and invested again via the Vision Fund itself. That’s also the plan for this Grab deal, TechCrunch understands.

SoftBank’s most recent financial report, filed in November, explains that it plans to move its stakes in ride-hailing firms Uber, China’s Didi, India’s Ola and Grab over to the Vision Fund. But that hasn’t happened yet and it isn’t clear when it will.

“The Company expects that the necessary procedures will be made in the future to obtain applicable consent from limited partners of the Fund and regulatory approvals for the transfer,” it explained in the report, which doesn’t include a projected timeframe.

One source told TechCrunch that the investment in Grab is contingent on that equity transfer being made, as was the case with Tokopedia and Coupang, which saw SoftBank-owned stakes transferred to the fund in Q3 of this year.

While we don’t know how long that wait will be, Grab is hardly short on cash. The Singapore-based company is putting the final touches to its Series H fund which is focused on raising a total of $3 billion. It has already received significant contributions from Toyota, Microsoft, Yamaha Motors, Booking Holdings and a range of institutional investors.

Grab operates across eight markets in Southeast Asia, where it claims over 130 million downloads and more than 2.5 billion completed rides to date. The company acquired Uber’s business earlier this year in a deal that saw the U.S. company pick up a 27.5 percent stake in Grab and turn their rivalry into a partnership. The merger deal, however, was criticized by regulators and, in Singapore, the pair were fined a total of $9.5 million for violating anti-competition laws.

Grab is Southeast Asia’s highest-valued tech startup, having commanded an $11 billion valuation through this Series H round. It isn’t clear how much that figure will increase if, as and when this Vision Fund investment closes. The company has raised around $6.8 billion to date from investors, according to data from Crunchbase.

IBM Research and agtech startup Hello Tractor have developed an AI and blockchain-driven platform for Africa’s farmers. The two companies will pilot the product in 2019 through an ongoing partnership co-financed by IBM.

Dubbed Digital Wallet in beta, the cloud-based service aims to support Hello Tractor’s business of connecting small-scale farmers to equipment and data analytics for better crop production.

“Agriculture is a complex industry that can have so many different variables. We’re bringing a decision tool to the Hello Tractor ecosystem powered by AI and blockchain,” Hello Tractor CEO Jehiel Oliver told TechCrunch.

The startup joined IBM Research to demo the new service at Startup Battlefield Africa in Lagos.

Available to Hello Tractor clients, the online platform will use a digital ledger and machine learning to capture, track, and share data, while “creating end-to-end trust and transparency across the agribusiness value chain,” according to an IBM release.

Digital Wallet will draw on remote and IoT-based weather-sensing methods and AI to help farmers determine crops and inputs, choose when to plant and optimize and predict crop yields.

The cloud-based dashboard also employs a blockchain ledger to improve multiple points of Hello Tractor’s business.

“We’re an agricultural technology company. Our platform connects farmers who need tractor services to tractor owners who own these assets as a business. We create that marketplace to bring supply and demand together,” said Oliver.

The demand stems from the 80 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s crops harvested without tractors or machinery and the 50 percent of the continent’s farmers who suffer post-harvest losses annually, according to IBM and the Food and Agricultural Organization.

IBM and Hello Tractor’s Digital Wallet will also loop in data from fleet owners regarding tractor use, track and predict repairs and servicing and build credit profiles to open bank financing for farmers.

Hello Tractor is a connecting service — neither the startup nor its farming clients own tractors. Founded in 2014, the venture began operations in Nigeria and has expanded into Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania and Bangladesh within the last year, according to its CEO. A for-profit entity, Hello Tractor has raised funding from private investors, DFI grants and a seed round.

The company currently generates revenue by selling the tractor-monitoring devices and software subscriptions for its app, according to Oliver. Hello Tractor doesn’t yet charge transactional fees for connecting tractors to farmers, “but we’ll be testing that next year,” he said.

The startup also plans to create broader revenue opportunities from data analytics.

“At this phase we focus primarily on mechanization, but coupling the insights being generated through that device with the IBM platform solutions specifically for agriculture can extend the value we offer our customers and…be monetized,” said Oliver.

He estimates the business of connecting small-scale farmers to tractors as a “multi-billion market” globally and pointed to Nigeria as the African nation with “the largest inventory of arable-uncultivated farmland,” 37 percent of the country, according to World Bank data.

IBM Research’s co-financing to build Digital Wallet does not include any equity stake in Hello Tractor, IBM confirmed.

The collaboration aligns with IBM’s global agricultural strategy, embedded largely in its Watson AI business platform and global agtech partnerships. As TechCrunch covered, IBM partnered with Kenyan agtech startup Twiga earlier this year to introduce to Twiga’s network of vendors a blockchain-enabled working capital platform.

IBM Research views the partnership “as scientific research collaboration,” according to VP Solomon Assefa.

“Through all its touch points — farmers, machinery, dealers, crop yields, data inputs — Hello Tractor is convening the whole agricultural ecosystem,” he said.

As discussed at Startup Battlefield Africa, Africa is shaping its own blockchain-focused startups and use cases — characterized more by utility than speculation. On the crypto-side, there were several 2018 ICOs, including remittance startup SurRemit’s $7 million token launch, payments venture Wala’s $1 million offering and one by South African solar energy startup Sun Exchange.

IBM Research and Hello Tractor teams will continue to build out the blockchain-enabled Digital Wallet on a lab, engineer and business level throughout 2019.

“We’re cultivating the partnership… including the executive and go-to-market side. You also have to focus on how you scale,” said Assefa.

Thousands of people trusted Blind, an app-based “anonymous social network,” as a safe way to reveal malfeasance, wrongdoing and improper conduct at their companies.

But Blind left one of its database servers exposed without a password for more than a month, making it possible for anyone who knew where to look to access each user’s account information and identify would-be whistleblowers.

The South Korea-founded company made its way into the U.S. in 2015, when it quickly became a highly popular anonymous social network for major tech companies, touting employees from Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Uber, and more. Blind last month secured another $10 million in new funding after a $6 million raise in 2017. But it was only when the social network became the root of several high profile scandals when Blind gained mainstream attention, including revealing allegations of sexual harassment at Uber — which later blocked the app on its corporate network.

The exposed server was found by a security researcher, who goes by the name Mossab H, who informed the company of the security lapse. The security researcher found one of the company’s Kibana dashboard for its backend ElasticSearch database, which contained several tables, including private messaging data and web-based content, for both of its U.S. and Korean sites. Blind said that the exposure only affects users who signed up or logged in between November 1 and December 19, and that the exposure relates to “a single server, one among many servers on our platform,” according to Blind executive Kyum Kim in an email.

Blind only pulled the database after TechCrunch followed up by email a week later. The company began emailing its users on Thursday after we asked for comment.

“While developing an internal tool to improve our service for our users, we became aware of an error that exposed user data,” the email to affected users said.

Kim said that there is “no evidence” that the database was misappropriated or misused, but did not say how it came to that conclusion. When asked, the company would not say if it will notify U.S. state regulators of the breach.

Blind’s chief executive Sunguk Moon, who was copied on many of the emails with TechCrunch, did not comment or acknowledge the exposure.

At its core, the app and anonymous social network allows users to sign up using their corporate email address, which is said to be linked only to Blind’s member ID. Email addresses are “only used for verification” to allow users to talk to other anonymous people in their company, and the company claims that email addresses aren’t stored on its servers.

But after reviewing a portion of the exposed data, some of the company’s claims do not stand up.

We found that the database provided a real-time stream of user logins, user posts, comments and other interactions, allowing anyone to read private comments and posts. The database also revealed the unencrypted private messages between members, but not the associated email addresses of each user. (Given the highly sensitivity of the data and the privacy of the affected users, we’re not posting data, screenshots or specifics of user content.)

Blind claims on its website that its email verification “is safe, as our patented infrastructure is set up so that all user account and activity information is completely disconnected from the email verification process.” It adds: “This effectively means there is no way to trace back your activity on Blind to an email address, because even we can’t do it.” Blind claims that the database “does not show any mapping of email addresses to nicknames,” but we found did find streams of email addresses associated with members who had not yet posted. We should note, though, in our brief review, we didn’t find any content, such as comments or messages, associated with email addresses. Assuming the database disconnected and removed an email address from each member ID, it still could have been possible to know the identity of a user who posts in the future.

Many records did, however, contain plaintext email addresses. When other records didn’t store an email address, the record contained the user’s email as an unrecognized encrypted hash — which may be decipherable to Blind employees, but not to anyone else.

The database also contained passwords, which were stored as an MD5 hash, a long-outdated algorithm that is nowadays easy to crack. Many of the passwords were easily unscrambled using readily available tools when we tried. Kim denied this. “We don’t use MD5 for our passwords to store them,” he said. “The MD5 keys were a log and it does not represent how we are managing data. We use more advanced methods like salted hash and SHA2 on securing users’ data in our database.” (Logging in with an email address and unscrambled password would be unlawful, therefore we cannot verify this claim.) That may pose a risk to employees who use the same password on the app as they login to their corporate accounts.

Despite the company’s apparent efforts to disassociate email addresses from its platform, login records in the database also stored user account access tokens — the same kind of tokens that recently put Microsoft and Facebook accounts at risk. If a malicious actor took and used a token, they could login as that user — effectively removing any anonymity they might have had from the database in the first place.

As well intentioned as the app may be, the database exposure puts users — who trusted the app to keep their information safe and their identities anonymous — at risk.

These aren’t just users, but also employees of some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley, who posts about sexual harassment in the workplace and discussing job offers and workplace culture. Many of those who signed up in the past month include senior executives at major tech companies but don’t realize that their email address — which identifies them — could be sitting plaintext in an exposed database. Some users sent anonymous, private messages in some cases made serious allegations against their colleagues or their managers, while others expressed concern that their employers were monitoring their emails for Blind sign-up emails.

Yet, it likely escaped many that the app they were using — often for relief, for empathy, or as a way to disclose wrongdoing — was almost entirely unencrypted and could be accessed, not only by the app’s employees but also for a time anyone on the internet.

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The man who led the Department of Defense for the first two years of the Trump administration will wrap up his tenure early next year. Retired Marine General James Mattis will leave his post by February 28, 2019. Mattis, who retired from the Marine Corps in 2013, received a special congressional waiver to serve as defense secretary.

President Trump characteristically announced the retirement in a pair of tweets, followed by a full resignation letter from Mattis.

In the letter, Mattis alludes to his fundamental ideological differences with Trump in leading the U.S. and interacting with its allies:

“My views of treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues,” Mattis writes.

“Because you have the right to have a secretary of defense whose views are better aligned with yours… I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

Twitter was down 11 percent today after a Citron Research report called the platform, the “Harvey Weinstein of social media” and set a low target price of $20. As of publishing today, the stock was down more than 11 percent at $29.29 a share.

In their report Citron did not mince words, basing their conclusions on an Amnesty International Report claiming widespread abuse on the Twitter platform. “Citron has been following Twitter for years and when we read the just published piece from Amnesty International, we immediately knew the stock had become uninvestable and advertisers will soon be forced to take a hard look at all sponsorships with Twitter,” Citron wrote.

Citron was reacting to an Amnesty International report that took Twitter to task for not doing more to curb abusive behavior. “We have built the world’s largest crowdsourced data set about online abuse against women… Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked,” the report stated.

The report went on to call out Twitter for not doing more. “To be clear: it is NOT our job as a human rights organization to be analyzing abusive tweets on this platform – it’s Twitter’s. “But [the company’s] refusal to make public this information, while allowing abuse to flourish basically unchecked, meant we had to do this study for them,” the report said.

For its part, Twitter says it’s been working to reign in the kind of abuses that the Amnesty report criticized them for. “Our abusive behavior policy strictly prohibits behavior that harasses, intimidates or silences another user’s voice. We are also investing in better technology and tools to enable us to more proactively identify abusive, violative material, to limit its spread and reach on the platform and to encourage healthier conversations,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Global Lead at Twitter, defended his company, claiming that it wasn’t clear how Amnesty defined abusive language in the report. “With regard to [the] forthcoming [Amnesty International] report, I would note that the concept of ‘problematic’ content for the purposes of classifying content is one that warrants further discussion. It is unclear how [Amnesty has] defined or categorized such content, or if [they] are suggesting it should be removed from Twitter. We work hard to build globally enforceable rules and have begun consulting the public as part of the process — a new approach within the industry,” he said in a statement.

Social game developer Zynga has entered into an agreement to acquire Small Giant Games, the startup behind the popular mobile game Empires & Puzzles, in a deal expected to total $700 million.

Zynga, which has tumbled since its 2011 Nasdaq initial public offering, will initially acquire 80 percent of Small Giant Games for $560 million, composed of $330 million in cash and $230 million of unregistered Zynga common stock. Zynga will fund part of the transaction with a $200 million credit facility.

“We’ve been impressed by the quality and momentum of Empires & Puzzles as we add another Forever Franchise into Zynga’s portfolio,” Zynga chief executive officer Frank Gibeau said in a statement. “Small Giant has created an innovative game that delivers a unique player experience that engages over the long term.”

The deal is expected to close on January 1. Zynga will purchase the remaining 20 percent of Small Giant over the next three years “at valuations based on specified profitability goals.”

Helsinki-based Small Giant Games had raised $52 million in equity funding from EQT Ventures, Creandum, Spintop Ventures, Profounders and others since it was founded in 2013. The company reported $33 million of revenue for Empires & Puzzles, its most popular game, 10 months after its launch in 2017. Small Giant, which is also behind Alliance Wars and Season 2: Atlantis, says they exceeded 2017’s revenue just four months into 2018.

“Our studio was founded on the idea that small, skillful teams can accomplish giant things, and I am confident that partnering with Zynga is the right next step in our evolution,” Small Giant CEO Timo Soininen said in a statement. “We will now operate as a separate studio within Zynga, maintaining our identity, culture and creative independence. By leveraging the expertise and support from the wider Zynga team, we will amplify the reach of Empires & Puzzles and the new games in our development pipeline.”

Zynga, founded in 2007, is the developer of FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Words with Friends and several other mobile games. The company reported revenues of $248.88 million for the quarter ended September 2018, failing to meet analyst estimates.

Zynga expects to bring in $243 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Apple’s transparency report just got a lot more — well, transparent.

For years, the technology giant released a twice-a-year report on the number of government demands it received. It wasn’t much to look at in the beginning; a seven-page document with only two tables of data. Once in a while, Apple would tack on a new table of data as the government would ask for new kinds of customer data.

But that wasn’t sustainable, nor was it particularly easy to read — especially for the hawkish handful who would obsessively read and digest each report.

As other companies, like Microsoft and Google, received more demands over the years, they began to expand their own reports to help users to better understand who wanted their data, why, and how often. Apple knew its document-only reports didn’t cut it, and took a leaf from its Silicon Valley neighbors and pushed ahead with its own plan to publish its biannual numbers in a way that ordinary people — like its customers — can read and understand.

The company’s latest transparency report, out Thursday, still comes in its traditional PDF format for those who don’t like change, but now also has its own dedicated, browsable and interactive corner of Apple’s website. The new site breaks down the figures by country — but also historically to provide trends, patterns and context over years’ worth of reporting cycles, in a way that’s more in line with how other tech giants report their government data demands.

And, the company has CSV files for download, containing raw data for academics to drill deeper down into the numbers.

Apple has also reworked how it discloses national security requests, such as FBI-issued subpoenas like national security letters (NSLs) and orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). Since the introduction of the Freedom Act in 2015, passed in response to the NSA surveillance scandal in 2013, companies were given three options of reporting their secret orders — including the numerical bands it can release under what time period. Most companies disclosed the secret requests in bands of 500 with a six-month reporting delay to avoid any inadvertent interference with active investigations. Apple originally released its figures in bands of 250 requests, but is now expanding that to bands of 500 requests to standardize its reporting with other tech companies. It’s also breaking out its FISA content (such as photos, email, contacts, and device backups) and non-content requests (like subscriber records and transactional logs).

As for the figures, the transparency report reveals a rise in worldwide demands for data.

According to the report, Apple received 32,342 demands — up 9 percent on the last reporting period — to access 163,823 devices in the second-half of the year.

The report found Germany as the top requester, issuing 13,704 requests for data on 26,160 devices. Apple said that the figures were due to the high volume of device requests due to stolen devices. U.S. was in second place with 4,570 requests for 14,911 devices.

Apple also received 4,177 requests for account data, such as information stored in iCloud — up by almost 25 percent on the previous reporting period — affecting some 40,641 accounts, a four-fold increase. The company said the spike was attributable to China, which asked for thousands of devices’ worth of data under a single fraud investigation.

And, the company saw a 30 percent increase in requests to preserve data for up to three months to 1,579 cases, affecting 4,033 accounts, while law enforcement obtained the right legal process to access the data.

The company also said it received between 0 and 499 national security orders, including secret rulings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, affecting 1,000 and 1,499 accounts.

Apple did not reveal any national security letters where the gag orders were lifted in this latest report.

Back in March came the surprising news that a satellite communications company still more or less in stealth mode had launched several tiny craft into orbit — against the explicit instructions of the FCC. The company, Swarm Technologies, now faces a $900,000 penalty from the agency as well as extra oversight of its continuing operations.

Swarm’s SpaceBEEs are the beginning of a planned constellation of small satellites with which the company intends to provide low-cost global connectivity.

Unfortunately, the units are so small — about a quarter the size of a standard cubesat, which is already quite tiny — that the FCC felt they would be too difficult to track, and did not approve the launch.

Swarm, perhaps thinking it better to ask forgiveness than file the paperwork for permission, launched anyway in January aboard India’s PSLV-C40, which carried more than a dozen other passengers to space as well. (I asked Swarm and the launch provider, Spaceflight, at the time for comment but never heard back.)

The FCC obviously didn’t like this, and began an investigation shortly afterwards. According to an FCC press release:

The investigation found that Swarm had launched the four BEEs using an unaffiliated launch company in India and had unlawfully transmitted signals between earth stations in Georgia and the satellites for over a week. In addition, during the course of its investigation, the FCC discovered that Swarm had also performed unauthorized weather balloon-to-ground station tests and other unauthorized equipment tests prior to the small satellites launch. All these activities require FCC authorization and the company had not received such authorization before the activities occurred.

Not good! As penance, Swarm Technologies will have to pay the aforementioned $900,000, and now has to submit pre-launch reports to the FCC within 5 days of signing an agreement to launch, and at least 45 days before takeoff.

The company hasn’t been sitting on its hands this whole time. The unauthorized launch was a mistake to be sure, but it has continued its pursuit of a global constellation and launched three more SpaceBEEs into orbit just a few weeks ago aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9.

Swarm has worked to put the concerns about tracking to bed; in fact, the company claims its devices are more trackable than ordinary cubesats, with a larger radar cross section and extra reflectivity thanks to a Van Atta array (ask them). SpaceBEE-1 is about to pass over Italy as I write this — you can check its location live here.

Look, I get it. Even when executed well, superhero origin stories on the big screen have become depressingly formulaic — and with the exception of “Wonder Woman,” the ones in the DC Extended Universe haven’t been executed well.

And although I was one of the few moviegoers who actually enjoyed last year’s “Justice League,” I’ll admit the Aquaman material didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the character’s solo film. Jason Momoa’s charm couldn’t obscure the fact that he was largely reduced to grunting catchphrases like “My man!”, or that the one or two scenes delving into his backstory were easily the least comprehensible parts of an often incomprehensible film.

But now that “Aquaman” is about to open domestically (a couple weeks after kicking off a hugely successful run in China), I have to tell you: I loved it.

It certainly has its flaws, like a script full of clunky exposition, stretched out by fetch quests that were transparently designed to keep our heroes occupied until the grand finale. It’s also insanely overstuffed, trying to make room for a star-crossed romance, an Indiana Jones-style archeological adventure, a fantasy epic with giant sea monsters and the standard reluctant hero beats, all in a runtime that’s a hair under two-and-a-half hours.

But that four-films-for-the-price-of-one quality is exactly why I liked it so much. “Aquaman” is a big, crazy movie, full of big, crazy moments. And while some of those moments are pretty dumb (this movie is absolutely unafraid of looking dumb), very little of it is boring.

Take the opening, which doesn’t actually start with Aquaman. Instead, we see a lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison) stumbling across a mysterious, wounded woman from the sea (Nicole Kidman). The romance that ensues may be pretty standard fare, but Morrison and Kidman are talented enough to make it funny and — when circumstances inevitably pull them apart — a little sad.

Of course, the couple has a son, and that son grows up to be played by the hulking Momoa. The adult Arthur Curry can talk with fish and other sea animals, and he’s also got superhuman strength and toughness. Plus, he’s the firstborn heir to the throne of Atlantis — a fact that becomes more pressing with the arrival of Mera (Amber Heard), who’s hoping to enlist him in her plans to stop his brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) from declaring war on the surface world. Soon enough, Arthur and Mera are searching for a mythical trident while being hunted by Orm and and the vengeful pirate Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II).

Like I said, that search involves several more steps than necessary, but I really didn’t mind. Although Momoa’s version of Aquaman as a gruff, hard-drinking superhero bro can be grating (particularly in a solo movie, where he doesn’t have the counterbalance of a Wonder Woman or a Flash), I found myself warming to him as the story went on. And most of the action scenes are impressively staged, particularly a long, brutal fight between Aquaman, Mera and Black Manta in Sicily.

That scene aside, the movie is at its best when it stays underwater, where director James Wan and his design team have created a vivid fantasy world. It can take a few minutes to get used to the wavy hair and distorted speech (because they’re speaking underwater, see?), but once you do, you’ll enjoy the sight of royalty riding sharks and manta rays, and you’ll get to visit kingdoms where fish people and crab people rule. (My zoological knowledge may be failing me here, but I think the movie actually has two different kinds of crab people.)

Is it silly? Of course. But the instant I saw a manta ray shooting laser beams, I was on-board. And when Aquaman and Mera entered the sprawling, psychedelically-colored city of Atlantis, my inner 13-year-old nearly fainted from excitement.

That was all before before the final battle, which saw vast armies of underwater creatures charging at each other while colossal sea beasts erupted from the ground beneath their feet. It’s like a deranged cross between “Lord of the Rings” and “Pacific Rim,” and it is glorious.

This movie isn’t for everyone, but I think I’ve figured out a simple litmus test to determine whether you’re in the target audience: Do you want to see Jason Momoa face off against a multi-tentacled monster? And what if that multi-tentacled monster was voiced by Julie Andrews?

If that’s what you’re looking for, “Aquaman” will not disappoint.