REVIEW: Underwater

I’ve always wanted to make a deep-sea film.

If you were unfortunate enough to have me in an APU scriptwriting course, you probably heard me pitch at least 2 ocean-based ideas...okay 4 or 5 ocean-based ideas. I just love the concept that there’s this undiscovered place right under our noses. The idea that with all our scientific might, we still know so little about our own planet. How space-y our home can be. How dangerous. How strange.

Life Aquatic captures a bit of that mojo, but I really don’t think anyone has done justice to the concept of on screen underwater sci-fi yet, and with the release of the box office bomb Underwater, we’ll likely have even longer to wait.

A waste of the director’s time, a waste of the actor’s time, certainly a waste of my time, the fact that anyone bothered to cobble together this tonal mess of a Ridley Scott rip off is beyond me.

We cold open on my least favorite modern trope: a bunch of random blinking headlines, desperately trying to give the audience some context to the events about to take place. This time around it’s a biiiig scarrwy mega corporation that yadda yadda yadda. Do you care? Why does this exist? I thought we got rid of earnestly doing the spinning newspaper thing back in the 60s?

Let’s continue.

The real cold open is Kristen Stewart doing her dead level best to muddle through a V.O. that is not only irrelevant for the entire film, but written with a bizarre teenage angst you’d expect to find in a book by John Green. Unfortunately this 2 minute long monologue with inexplicably bad sound editing is the only piece of well paced character development we get from anyone in the story, as the movie immediately transitions into super crazy panic mode.

Instead of building real suspense, or nailing down character dynamics, or making any sensible choice, the writers get everyone running around bleeding or whatever as the entire submarine collapses. It’s painful.

The structural decisions made in the first 5 minutes of Underwater not only undercut any chance of drama the movie could of had, but they undercut the tension itself, as characters are too busy babbling about their dead children or establishing fiancees to actually let a spooky moment be spooky. Entire personalities are crammed in, screamed above a perfectly good score that could have actually pulled this thing out of the gutter.

The chemistry of the cast feels akin to being forced into a 7th grade group project: awkward, annoying, and just a little bit sad.

It seems T.J. Miller (most famously known as that booger from the Mucinex commercials) wants to be in a campy thriller akin to Deep Blue Sea. Meanwhile, Vincent Cassel is in the same movie as Kristen Stewart, literally acting his freakin’ heart out and desperately trying to feed some pathos into this straight cadaver of a horror script. The rest of our crew have absolutely no idea what to do, and despite being clearly talented performers, (John Gallagher Jr. and Mamoudou Athie are ones to watch) their perspectives only make the film more confusing as it rushes from Alien ripoff to Pacific Rim ripoff.

Even with a couple of cool action shots, Underwater is just this cavalcade of clichés that stare back at you and dare you to blink. It’s the kind of movie that feels like a committee of sentient ducks came in halfway through pre-production and railroaded every bad narrative decision to be just a little bit worse.

I can only hope the creatives behind this one will pick themselves back up, knock the dust off, and learn from their mistakes.

1/5

P.S. My Uncut Gems review is available now on Patreon! So if you want to support me there, there’s that! :D