UNDERWATER
***
Director: William Eubank
Screenwriters: Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad, from a story by Duffield.
Principal cast:
Kristen Stewart
Vincent Cassel
Jessica Henwick
T. J. Miller
John Gallagher Jr.
Mamoudou Athie
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 95 mins.
Australian release date: 23 January 2020.
Hard on the heels of Charlie’s Angels and sporting another super-short hairstyle, Kristen Stewart plays the lead role in Underwater, a woman trapped in a damaged drilling station after an accident 11 kilometres below the surface of the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench. She plays Norah Price, a mechanical engineer working for TIAN Industries, a mining company undertaking exploratory drilling below the ocean floor. Desperate to survive, she and a small team of fellow survivors set off to try and reach another station which may contain some functional escape pods, their only possibility of getting to the surface alive. In interviews, Stewart maintained that it was time for her to do another large-scale movie, after earlier art-house films like The Clouds Of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper and the soon-to-be-released Seberg, And why not? Stewart is one of the few actors able to cross back-and-forth between small, intimate films and big budget B-movies like this one and Charlie’s Angels.
The director, William Eubank, takes his audience on an extremely claustrophobic experience, at least in the early part of Underwater. The atmosphere is truly stifling at times. Norah and her workmate Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie) seem to be the only survivors in their section of the rig, until they stumble across another crew member, Paul (T.J. Miller), and his companion, a toy rabbit. Whatever it takes, I guess! As they search for escape pods, they discover that Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel) has also survived. Reaching another section of the drill, they find that research student Emily (Jessica Henwick) and her technician boyfriend, Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), have managed to stay alive, too, and the six of them head for the floor of the trench. Lucien hatches a plan that involves them walking in pressurised suits across the bottom of the ocean to another station about a kilometre away, where they hope to find enough working pods for them to get the hell out of there. There’s just one problem - it appears they are being stalked by unknown creatures intent on killing them all. Inevitably, as in all good tales of this genre, their numbers start to diminish one by one, while heroic acts save others. The question is, as always, who will make it through the ordeal?
Underwater is a well-made, good-looking production, but it’s lazy. Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad’s screenplay contains all the usual tropes of the monster movie, which is fine if you’re prepared to mix them up a bit. Unfortunately, their script doesn’t. For example, if you’ve seen other films of this kind, you’ll easily predict the order in which the characters are killed off. The standard elements of the ‘unknown monsters out there’ genre can be reworked to make something fresh and original, à la Alien or The Blair Witch Project, to name just two classics of the type, but writers must be prepared to play with them, otherwise it’s just the same ol’, same ol’. Where the film does excel is in its mise en scène. The sets built for the various locations look suitably worn and used, yet slightly futuristic - the look is described as ‘future past’ - and specialised lighting helps create the illusion of a full-scale aquatic environment on soundstages, which were flooded with fog to enhance the effect. Then the actors (or their stunt doubles) performed on wires or in harnesses to appear as though they are floating. In fact, most of the underwater scenes weren’t shot in tanks at all, like The Rescue, but on land, with SFX added in post-production and state-of-the-art techniques used to create the appearance of currents, bubbles and particulate matter. This murky appearance adds to the tension because the protagonists can never see very far through the gloom when they’re away from the various stations.
So, while there are some good parts to Underwater (and Stewart is one of them), ultimately it’s a bit lame. And those monsters? They’re overboard!
Screenwriters: Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad, from a story by Duffield.
Principal cast:
Kristen Stewart
Vincent Cassel
Jessica Henwick
T. J. Miller
John Gallagher Jr.
Mamoudou Athie
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 95 mins.
Australian release date: 23 January 2020.
Hard on the heels of Charlie’s Angels and sporting another super-short hairstyle, Kristen Stewart plays the lead role in Underwater, a woman trapped in a damaged drilling station after an accident 11 kilometres below the surface of the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench. She plays Norah Price, a mechanical engineer working for TIAN Industries, a mining company undertaking exploratory drilling below the ocean floor. Desperate to survive, she and a small team of fellow survivors set off to try and reach another station which may contain some functional escape pods, their only possibility of getting to the surface alive. In interviews, Stewart maintained that it was time for her to do another large-scale movie, after earlier art-house films like The Clouds Of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper and the soon-to-be-released Seberg, And why not? Stewart is one of the few actors able to cross back-and-forth between small, intimate films and big budget B-movies like this one and Charlie’s Angels.
The director, William Eubank, takes his audience on an extremely claustrophobic experience, at least in the early part of Underwater. The atmosphere is truly stifling at times. Norah and her workmate Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie) seem to be the only survivors in their section of the rig, until they stumble across another crew member, Paul (T.J. Miller), and his companion, a toy rabbit. Whatever it takes, I guess! As they search for escape pods, they discover that Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel) has also survived. Reaching another section of the drill, they find that research student Emily (Jessica Henwick) and her technician boyfriend, Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), have managed to stay alive, too, and the six of them head for the floor of the trench. Lucien hatches a plan that involves them walking in pressurised suits across the bottom of the ocean to another station about a kilometre away, where they hope to find enough working pods for them to get the hell out of there. There’s just one problem - it appears they are being stalked by unknown creatures intent on killing them all. Inevitably, as in all good tales of this genre, their numbers start to diminish one by one, while heroic acts save others. The question is, as always, who will make it through the ordeal?
Underwater is a well-made, good-looking production, but it’s lazy. Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad’s screenplay contains all the usual tropes of the monster movie, which is fine if you’re prepared to mix them up a bit. Unfortunately, their script doesn’t. For example, if you’ve seen other films of this kind, you’ll easily predict the order in which the characters are killed off. The standard elements of the ‘unknown monsters out there’ genre can be reworked to make something fresh and original, à la Alien or The Blair Witch Project, to name just two classics of the type, but writers must be prepared to play with them, otherwise it’s just the same ol’, same ol’. Where the film does excel is in its mise en scène. The sets built for the various locations look suitably worn and used, yet slightly futuristic - the look is described as ‘future past’ - and specialised lighting helps create the illusion of a full-scale aquatic environment on soundstages, which were flooded with fog to enhance the effect. Then the actors (or their stunt doubles) performed on wires or in harnesses to appear as though they are floating. In fact, most of the underwater scenes weren’t shot in tanks at all, like The Rescue, but on land, with SFX added in post-production and state-of-the-art techniques used to create the appearance of currents, bubbles and particulate matter. This murky appearance adds to the tension because the protagonists can never see very far through the gloom when they’re away from the various stations.
So, while there are some good parts to Underwater (and Stewart is one of them), ultimately it’s a bit lame. And those monsters? They’re overboard!