Underwater: Yet another horrific trip to the ocean bottom, with diminishing returns
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C-minus
A dull piece of off-season horror flotsam, Underwater suffers from two kinds of genetic drift. It is the umpteenth movie about messing with the ocean bottom (DeepStar Six, Leviathan, The Meg, etc.), where, apparently, there be dragons rather than blind albino shrimp.
It is also the latest, and most blatant, of God-knows-how-many Alien rip-offs that have taken up space in the multiplex in one critic’s lifetime.
Underwater: Yep, this is about as clear as it gets.
Sure, the six-mile-deep monsters, when we finally see them in their various iterations (including a small, nasty one on, ahem, a metal examination table) look like reject drawings stolen from H.R. Giger’s sock drawer. But on a prurient and gratuitous level, Ridley Scott’s Alien only had one scene with its female lead in her underwear. Underwater’s star, Kristen Stewart spends considerably more screentime in hers.
One reason we’re given is that “pants don’t fit” in the thick pressurized suits that the crew of a sprawling drill complex at the bottom of the Marianas Trench use to traipse around in. There’s some visual indication that some men’s pants may fit. But to be fair to the filmmakers, they do have Silicon Valley’s T.J. Miller show off his dad-bod and holey underwear.
Written by Brian Duffield (who gave us the Divergent franchise movie Insurgent) and directed by William Eubank, Underwater skips the foreplay, flashing a bunch of headlines about the construction of a massive drilling project in the most difficult depths of the Pacific Ocean (the kind of fool’s project only Elon Musk would take on).
It then lets hell loose in its very first scene. An insomniac Norah (Stewart) is seen splashing her face, and, in narration, describing an existence without day or night. Suddenly, she notices a drip from the ceiling – not the kind of thing you want to see when you are living in a module under a thousand atmospheres of pressure.
Walls explode, hatches are shut. People die. Norah and a few survivors make it to the bridge, where the Captain (Vincent Cassel) is waiting to go down, or remain down, with his ship.
After a few exploratory ocean-floor-walks to assess the situation (and have a first encounter with their new friends), the Captain and schlemiels decide to walk from habitat to habitat and find some usable escape pods.
The logistics of all this are thrown at us like technobabble in a Star Trek episode. Suffice to say, nearly the entire movie is shot in the near-dark, the characters trudging around, with what sounds like banging on a submarine hull as the ambient noise, and occasional jump-scares and glimpses of things that go bump in the murk.
Science-wise, I give the writers credit for knowing that things at that level of pressure implode, since it’s mentioned in the dialogue. However, visually, there’s a lot of exploding going on, so somebody didn’t get the memo.
Underwater. Written by Brian Duffield, Directed by William Eubank. Stars Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel and T.J. Miller. Opens wide Friday, January 10.