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Maine coast, 1985. A stormy night. Tom Curry — Temuera Morrison, a Maori-American lighthouse keeper at the Amnesty Bay Lighthouse — finishes his shift and finds an unconscious woman in royal blue scaled-armor washed up on the rocks at sunrise. He brings her inside. He nurses her back to health. She's Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), the queen-in-exile of the underwater kingdom of Atlantis, who has fled an arranged political marriage on the surface to find peace. Tom and Atlanna fall in love over months. They marry. They have a son, Arthur, in 1986. They live as a happy fishing-village family for five years.

Then Atlantean soldiers arrive at the lighthouse. They've found her. Atlanna's royal duty calls her back to Atlantis. She kisses Tom goodbye. She tells five-year-old Arthur she will return when peace allows. She entrusts Arthur's Atlantean education to her loyal advisor Vulko — Willem Dafoe, in human-shaped scuba gear — who will visit the boy periodically. Atlanna walks into the surf. She never returns. Tom raises Arthur alone.

Young Arthur, age twelve. A school field trip to an aquarium in Boston. Arthur is being bullied by classmates. He hides behind the tank glass of the shark exhibit. The sharks behind the glass — and every other marine creature in the aquarium — turn their heads in unison toward him. He can communicate with them. He commands them telepathically. The bullies turn around. They see the tank's full population of sharks staring back at them through the glass. They flee. Arthur stays behind. Vulko, watching from the visitor's gallery, walks down to him. "Your mother chose you for this, Arthur. You are a king's son." Arthur begins Atlantean-language training with Vulko in the aquarium's basement.

Present day, late 2010s. Arthur (Jason Momoa, six-foot-four, bearded, in a black leather jacket and tactical sleeve-armor) is a full-grown adult living in Amnesty Bay with his father Tom, still operating the lighthouse, drinking at the local bar, occasionally surfacing to do anonymous superhero work. He has become known to the public as Aquaman through grainy phone footage of his open-water rescues. He has been a member of the Justice League briefly (the Whedon-cut Justice League). He does not want a throne. He wants beer and his dad.

Russian submarine attack. A nuclear submarine in the North Pacific is hijacked by pirates led by David Kane (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, intense, vengeful) and his father Jesse Kane (Michael Beach). The pirates are using highly-advanced Atlantean energy weapons — equipped, unbeknownst to them, by an Atlantean third party. Aquaman intercepts. He fights through the pirate crew with brutal efficiency. During the fight, Jesse Kane is pinned under a torpedo's release mechanism. Arthur could free him — but Jesse has just killed a Russian Navy crewman in cold blood seconds earlier. Arthur chooses not to save him. "You killed innocent people. Ask the sea for mercy." He walks away. Jesse drowns. David Kane, devastated, vows to hunt Aquaman for life.

Atlantis. King Orm Marius (Patrick Wilson, blonde, Aryan-imperious), Arthur's younger half-brother by his mother Atlanna's later arranged marriage, has been building toward a full surface-world war for years. The surface has been polluting the ocean for two centuries. Orm sees this as casus belli. He's secretly orchestrating the Russian submarine attack to bait the world's surface navies into firing on Atlantis. Orm needs the Atlantean Seven Kingdoms to unify behind him to declare war on the surface. He recruits King Nereus of Xebel (Dolph Lundgren, weathered, distrustful) by faking a surface-world submarine attack on Atlantis. Nereus's daughter Mera (Amber Heard, red hair, royal Xebel princess) is politically engaged to marry Orm.

Vulko arrives in Amnesty Bay. He's been watching Atlantis politically for thirty years and Orm is about to start a war that will kill millions on the surface. Mera has come with him, hidden in the lighthouse harbor. Arthur is recruited to challenge Orm for the throne by reclaiming Atlan's Trident — the trident of the lost first king of Atlantis, the artifact that signifies legitimate rulership. Whoever wields Atlan's Trident is by Atlantean law king of the Seven Kingdoms. The Trident has been lost for thousands of years. Mera believes she can lead Arthur to it.

The journey. Mera and Arthur travel to the Sahara desert — to ruins beneath the sand where the ancient kingdom of the Deserters once flourished. (Earth's continents were partly oceanic when Atlantis flourished; the Sahara was once a sea.) Inside the buried tomb, Vulko's library research has identified holographic recordings left by King Atlan himself, projected in living holographic form. Atlan's hologram speaks: he buried the Trident on a hidden land mass in a forgotten interior ocean at the center of the Earth, guarded by the Karathen, the largest sea-creature ever to exist. He provides coordinates. Arthur and Mera follow them.

Sicily, Italy. Arthur and Mera, en route to the next clue, are intercepted in a small Italian coastal village by David Kane — now wearing a custom Atlantean-built combat suit Orm has given him in exchange for becoming Orm's surface-world assassin against Aquaman. Kane has named the suit Black Manta — a sleek black helmet with enormous red optical lenses and shoulder-mounted plasma cannons. He attacks Mera, Arthur, and the Italian villagers across the rooftops of Castellammare del Golfo in a chase set piece that took James Wan five months to choreograph. Arthur and Mera escape to the next coordinate.

Crossing the Trench. The next destination is the Trench — a deep-Pacific abyssal zone inhabited by primordial sub-Atlantean sea creatures, the kind of body horror that should not exist. The Trench creatures are man-sized, eyeless, all-mouth nightmares that swarm Arthur and Mera as they descend. They survive by using flare-light to repel the creatures (the creatures, blind, hunt by sound). They pass through.

The Lost Kingdom. Beneath the Trench, Arthur and Mera fall through a dimensional wormhole into an underground ocean at Earth's mantle — a hidden geode-cavern body of water the size of a continent, never seen by Atlantean surface explorers in five thousand years. The Lost Kingdom of Necrus is here, frozen at the moment of its 12,000-BCE destruction. Arthur and Mera surface inside the cavern. On a hidden coast, in a small stone cottage, Queen Atlanna — Arthur's mother — is alive. She has been imprisoned in the Lost Kingdom by Atlantis's then-rulers for marrying a human, abandoned in the cavern as her punishment, and survived alone for thirty-three years. Arthur reunites with his mother. She's older but well. Vulko had known all along.

Atlan's Trident retrieval. The Karathen — the size of a city block, a sea monster the size of a Pacific tanker, eyes like two glowing suns — guards Atlan's Trident at the cavern's center. Arthur swims to her. He speaks her name. He uses his ability to communicate with sea life. The Karathen tells him in her thousand-foot-deep voice that only the worthy may approach the Trident. Arthur fails the test of words. The Karathen tells him only a man of pure Atlantean royal bloodline may bear it. Arthur tells her his story — half-surface, half-Atlantean, raised by a fisherman who reads to his son every night — and the Karathen, surprised by Arthur's mixed heritage humility, accepts him. He lifts the Trident from its stone setting. The Trident's power — Atlan's command of every sea creature on Earth — flows into him. The Karathen bows to him as her new king.

Battle of the Seven Kingdoms. Orm's forces, under the unified banner of three of the Seven Kingdoms (Atlantis, Xebel, Brine), are about to attack the surface world. Arthur surfaces from the Lost Kingdom riding the Karathen — a kilometer-long sea monster the size of a Manhattan skyline — with Trench creatures swimming as his honor guard. Mera leads a Xebel coup against her own father Nereus. The Battle of the Seven Kingdoms is the centerpiece set piece of the film: thousands of Atlantean cavalry on seahorses, sharks, and ancient sea-dragon mounts colliding in open ocean against Trench creatures and the Karathen. Black Manta is taken out by Mera and presumed dead. Orm sees the Karathen and immediately understands what has happened.

Arthur vs Orm. The two half-brothers fight one-on-one with Atlantean tridents on the back of a Karathen. Orm's swordwork is precision-perfect; Arthur's is brawler's strength. Orm cuts Arthur. Arthur picks up Atlan's Trident — the legitimate king's Trident — and the moment he raises it overhead, all of Orm's army, every Atlantean soldier in the battle, sees their new legitimate king. Orm's coalition collapses on the spot. Orm drops his sword. Arthur could kill him. Mera tells Arthur to spare his brother. Arthur spares him. Orm accepts house arrest in Atlantean prison. The war is canceled. Surface and Atlantis sign a non-aggression treaty.

Coronation. Arthur returns to the Atlantean throne in royal armor for the first time in his life. He is crowned King of Atlantis and the Seven Kingdoms. Mera, no longer engaged to Orm, becomes his queen. He surfaces afterward to the Amnesty Bay Lighthouse where his father Tom is waiting. He brings his mother Atlanna with him. Tom Curry sees Atlanna for the first time in thirty-three years. She walks up to him on the deck of the lighthouse. They embrace in the morning sun. The film closes on the family of three reunited.

Mid-credits. A salvaged-equipment fishing boat in the North Pacific. David Kane — Black Manta, alive but badly wounded — is being treated by Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park), an obsessive Atlantis-researcher and conspiracy theorist who has spent fifteen years trying to find Atlantis. Shin has retrieved Kane from the ocean and rebuilt his suit. Kane, fully recovered, swears revenge against Aquaman. Shin agrees to help him in exchange for being personally led to Atlantis. The two of them — Black Manta and Dr. Shin — will be the antagonists of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023). Cut to credits.