Underwater
Directed by: William Eubank
Written by: Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, T.J. Miller, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie
Action/Drama/Horror - 95 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 9 Jan 2020
Written by: Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, T.J. Miller, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie
Action/Drama/Horror - 95 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 9 Jan 2020
12 people have walked on the moon. Three have visited the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Either the moon is the more intriguing place to visit or it is easier to get to. Bureaucracy could be a variable - NASA plans and executes space projects; there does not appear to be a corresponding Department of Trenches. Corporations continue to explore the logistics of mining the ocean floor and calculate if the anticipated profit margins are worth such herculean efforts, but the Mariana Trench is even miles beneath the ocean floor. It is seven miles down there. Probing a familiar horror trope of “what if humans did” such and such, director William Eubank would like to show us one possible consequence of when humans dig in an environment so harsh it may be keeping us out for a reason. It’s not deja vu, The Meg followed these coordinates recently when humans went poking through an ocean layer they were not supposed to unleashing hungry Megalodons. Underwater stands on the shoulders of claustrophobic monster movie giants of the past, liberally helping itself to ideas and themes, but it fails to give back or push the genre anywhere fresh - its only major sin being how rote and episodic it all plays out.
No stranger to adapting books and rebooting various intellectual properties for screen such as one of the Divergent novels, a reboot Jack Ryan movie, and the Tarzan reboot, screenwriters Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad save the movie time by flashing newspaper headlines and computer diagrams to set the scene while the opening credits do their thing. A large multi-national begins the arduous process of building tunnels and drills on the bottom of the Mariana Trench to recover and exploit whatever resources hide down there. A bass-heavy synth soundtrack accompanies word flashes like “strange sightings” and “curious incidents”. The recent Godzilla reboot did something similar, laying out backstory so characters didn’t have to later on. Eubank has no time for calm and collected dialogue for either characters to establish themselves and get to know one another or to clear things up for us laymen in the audience - the underwater command station beings to implode and collapse within a minute or so of watching Kristen Stewart perform her evening toiletry regimen.
No stranger to adapting books and rebooting various intellectual properties for screen such as one of the Divergent novels, a reboot Jack Ryan movie, and the Tarzan reboot, screenwriters Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad save the movie time by flashing newspaper headlines and computer diagrams to set the scene while the opening credits do their thing. A large multi-national begins the arduous process of building tunnels and drills on the bottom of the Mariana Trench to recover and exploit whatever resources hide down there. A bass-heavy synth soundtrack accompanies word flashes like “strange sightings” and “curious incidents”. The recent Godzilla reboot did something similar, laying out backstory so characters didn’t have to later on. Eubank has no time for calm and collected dialogue for either characters to establish themselves and get to know one another or to clear things up for us laymen in the audience - the underwater command station beings to implode and collapse within a minute or so of watching Kristen Stewart perform her evening toiletry regimen.
Stewart (Charlie's Angels) plays Norah, a highly-skilled mechanical engineer with a murky backstory and a bookend voiceover more perfunctory than useful. Norah’s first soliloquy includes, “He was a glass half full type, I prefer empty. There’s comfort in cynicism; less to lose.” Beyond establishing that Norah is currently a sad sack of a human, none of this is necessary. Eubank barely makes time for any of it before the ceiling leaks and walls explode. A fairly small collective, six folks including a mostly useless in this situation research assistant and the rig’s Captain, seem to be the only survivors and make a crazy plan which just might work to save their skins. They must go down to go up. For whatever reason, the escape pods are out of the question, so the team dons heavy space suit contraptions, will walk a mile or so outside on the trench floor, reach the main drill site, and float up from there.
Underwater may exercise an homage of mimicry from everything from Alien to Deep Blue Sea, but Eubank achieves some claustrophobic feelings from the audience. Norah and crew must squeeze through some very tight spots and then Director of Photography, Bojan Bazelli (A Cure for Wellness), puts the camera inside the crews’s helmets. Everybody breathes heavy and we can barely see a thing. This literal in-your-face point of view limits us to a few feet of spatial awareness through opaque floating dirt, debris, and particles scanning for the slightest hint of a tentacle and forces us to prepare for inevitable jump scare shrieks. Whatever made the entire mining apparatus explode released some new lifeforms who are not adapting very well to their first contact with humans. Underwater learned from Jaws and plays hide the monster long enough to prod curiosity, but eventually is bold enough for a big reveal.
January is typically a month for Hollywood afterthoughts and test audience misfires, especially for horror films, but Underwater is not pure refuse. Character deaths do not mean anything because we never get know anybody, but trying to survive in a confined space when there may or may not be a monster right next to you is pretty hard to completely mess up. There is nothing truly terrifying like you would find in select installments of the Alien franchise nor is there anything to evoke wonderment at the life’s mysteries as in The Abyss. Once again, humans cross a boundary the natural world put in place for a reason and Mother Nature will push them back in no uncertain terms. Meh.
Comment Box is loading comments...
