by Conan Simmons – November 22, 2020 – 4:27 am
Filmed in early 2017 this movie sat on the shelf for three years before release in January 2020. During that time 20th Century Fox, which produced the movie, sold to Disney who clearly was just trying to clear the shelves on this one.
Starting off with a whole bunch of words on the screen that sum up to a giant drill underwater at the Mariana Trench the first character we meet is played by Kristen Stewart who takes a daddy long legs spider out of the sink where she is brushing her teeth. Needless voice over tells us nothing more than you lose track of day and night so far down underwater. Before you think the movie might start slow the facility she is living in creaks, cracks and breaks apart allowing the ocean water to come crashing in.
Kristen Stewart quickly finds refuge as anonymous characters so far away from the camera that you can’t even see their faces die in the flooding. Stewart then makes her way through what is left of the underwater facility picking up survivors here and there. Some of the survivors are played by Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick and obnoxious comedic actor TJ Miller.
The non-existent plot for the entire movie is this small group of survivors trying to escape to the surface. Too bad for them there happens to be strange creatures roaming the ocean floor.
There is no real story in this movie and every character is blandly two dimensional. For a group of people that supposedly have lived and worked together for months on end at the bottom of the ocean they sure don’t have anything going on between any of them.
The monsters look good and deserve a better movie. Supposedly, according to interviews of the director, the monster is Cthulhu. Given that there is no real story being told in this movie there is no way of confirming that. There’s only one clear look at one of the monsters and that is of one of the smaller ones that appears to have more tentacles than the larger variations.
The only noteworthy aspect of this movie is a distinct lesbian element between the protagonist and the only other female survivor. A brief conversation, that is the closest this movie gets to character development, between Stewart and Henwick is reminiscent of countless other movies where the often male hero talks with the leading lady. The attraction is only hinted at with romance never entering the equation. As ‘Underwater’ is nothing more than a starring vehicle for Kristen Stewart it may have been her idea to include this story idea, it feels too thought out to have been the director or screenwriters’ idea.
‘Underwater’ is written by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad. With two screenwriters it’s hard to fathom why this movie is so under written. Cozad’s previous credits include ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’ and ‘The Legend of Tarzan’, neither that great but indicates that Cozad was brought on this production to smooth out the bad dialogue in favor of emphasizing action sequences.
The cinematography during the underwater sequences is murky at best and damn near pitch black at worst. It smacks of the old trick of keeping things dark to cover the flaws in special effects. The monsters may look better than I think but too much of the film is obscured by poor cinematography and even worse directing.
Director William Eubank fails to make an engaging coherent movie with ‘Underwater’. The action is poorly filmed with shaky camera work and quick edits that it is more often than not difficult to understand what the characters are trying to accomplish or where the threat is coming from. Cutting back and forth from video game style point-of-view shots to close-ups of the actors as they are in peril keeps the movie from ever becoming tense, instead turning action scenes into dull moments as we wait to see a better view of the monsters which never happens.
‘Underwater’ has the budget that could have been used to make a decent creature feature but the miserable directing and the empty screenplay keeps it from being anything more than brainless filler. If you really want to see entertainingly bad underwater creature feature thrills skip ‘Underwater’ and stick with the dynamic duo from 1989, ‘Leviathan’ and ‘Deepstar Six’.