Bullet Points: Underwater

I never get tired of watching “creature attacking people” movies. Put them in space, the jungle, or some deep rift in the ocean somewhere, and I’ll gladly stare judgingly at them for two hours. Underwater had the perfect premise….for 1988. My first thoughts before even seeing the film are that it won’t even touch The Abyss, Leviathan, or Deepstar Six. Let’s hope that I’m wrong and this film that cost $80 million to make will somehow not make me want to throw up.

Synopsis: A crew of oceanic researchers working for a deep sea drilling company try to get to safety after a mysterious earthquake devastates their deepwater research and drilling facility located at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

• Drill, baby, drill: The Mariana Trench is a mysterious place. It’s great for science fiction films and horror because we can imagine what sorts of things live down there and they’re all bad for us. Tian Industries is the mega corporation that sent this crew all the way down into the depths of the sea for “research”. They say at the beginning of the film that there are over 300 people in the station and I got very excited because I was expecting some serious devastation! Sadly, we only spend time with about half a dozen, and we’re told some made it out in pods while we see others get buried in the flooded bits of the station.
• On the run: Kristen Stewart play Norah, who is a mechanical engineer on the station. It comes in real handy as she’s able to get them out of a few tight spots wit her ability to engineer things and read blueprints, and whatnot. It isn’t overdone and never feels like a “Mary Sue” so anyone who complains about it just needs to shut their traps! Think Ellen Ripley from Alien and less Ripley from Aliens. She’s helpful without fixing every situation. Norah ends up meeting up with the handful of other survivors and they’re off to find a way out.

• The suits and the station: The deep sea suits that they wear for a good portion of the film are really cool looking. In order to find a way to the surface they are forced to suit up and walk through tunnels, in flooded areas, and at the bottom of the seafloor. It’s certainly not the most exciting points of the film but it adds to the tension when they start realizing that they are not alone down there.
• The sea is dangerous: Not only are they at the bottom of a very deep trench with crazy pressures that literally kill a human not in special gear, but there is also some ominous shit happening all around. The survivors start finding members of their team that weren’t so lucky to live through the initial station collapse and they are trapped in some organic-looking tentacles and coils. Norah and Co. get a hold of one of the creatures and realize that they are being followed by a great number of them. TJ Miller, Vincent Cassel, and Jessica Henwick are among the survivors of the incident. The action in the film (the collapse of the station) begins within minutes and the crew don’t get the introductions you would normally see in a movie like this. It works, though. I enjoy the fact that we can learn about the characters through their actions and reactions instead of being told how they are in 20 minutes of useless dialogue. Give me more of this, please!

• The way out: Most of the film is the humans trying to find a vessel that will take them to the surface. There isn’t much of a fight against the creatures because I don’t think they stood much of a chance against them and they’re smart enough to understand that. One by one, they start getting picked off by the underwater monsters and soon the final few drag themselves to the actual drill where a few escape pods still sit. The drill being the cause of all of this mess, the actual ground zero for the disaster, they finally see what has been making so much noise around them…..

• Cthulhu: I don’t really know what the hell a Cthulhu is other than it’s some H.P. Lovecraft deal and folks seem to be obsessed with it. This creature turns out to be something from the Lovecraftian mythos and that probably should have been made more clear. I think that most things with the creatures falls flat because we never get a good look at them or what they can do to people. It’s made more clear throughout the film that we (humans, and specifically the good folks at Tian) have drilled far too deep and awoken these creatures. The more interesting thing, I think, is whether or not they drilled too deep by accident or on purpose. If you listen to the audio recordings on the ship that seem creepy and ominous as if they were expecting something to come. The other thing being that the very end of the film tells us that Tian is going back to drilling super deep. Are they just a bunch of crazy people searching for Cthulhu? I hope so….

The Verdict: There is a good reason that Underwater didn’t explode at the box office and bring in all sorts of money and that reason is that it doesn’t do anything original or exceptional. I commend the filmmakers for getting right to the action with the collapse of the station happening within the first few minutes of the film but I never became invested in any of the characters at any point during the movie. KStew does a decent job as the lead and ends up in her underwear several times throughout the film but there just wasn’t much meat on the bones for her to work with. I can think of at least 3 underwater creature films that I like better than this and they all came out in 1989. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t get some enjoyment out of Underwater. I love this type of film, as I’ve said many times in the past, and I appreciate that the format is still being used. It’s just too bad that this film was less an Aliens ripoff and more of a non-found footage Cloverfield. In fact, what if this HAD been a Cloverfield prequel….