Underwater Review

"Underwater" is a bemusing film that wants to be too much and settles for too little. Any movie with an underwater setting is riffed here, from monster-on-the-loose to disaster epics, but its becomes just "Alien," but underwater!

For its strengths, it would have to be its opening half, before things dilute to a basic creature feature, where the audience is playfully tricked into each moment of aquatic calamity is some sort of beast, only it isn't, but then sometimes is. Genres are swapped sometimes within the same scene seamlessly, and the little kid in me was smiling from ear to ear wondering where we would go next. We go to "Aliens R Us" unfortunately.

And that's fine, but the creativity stalls once the monster is revealed, looking like a baby Xenomorph, only, well, not from outer space. It grows into something else of course (what kind of clone do you think this is?), and only its final form, showed from a dark distance and with much opaqueness, inspires any thought (like "how did Hillary Swank miss this thing when she was on her way to "The Core"?").

The plot centers around Norah (Kristen Stewart) and a handful of survivors of a massive underwater mining facility that's collapsing. Things move at a startling brisk pace with very little in the way of character development, at least in the beginning. Once the obligatory body count increases and our cast is dwindled to a plucky few, the rare moments of small talk boils down to "what's your corgi's name?" Great dialogue...

Most ripoffs have the monster entering the human location (be it spaceship, cruise liner, etc.) but "Underwater" unwisely moves a bulk of the action underwater. Here director William Eubank and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli struggle to create any sort of personality from either the vacant ocean or the cast in their deepsea gear; characters are practically indistinguishable and there is no sense of scale to the water, or any clear idea where these people are in relation to the submarine buildings.

Look "Underwater" isn't bad by any means, with an effective cast and moments of fun spectacle, but sometimes it isn't enough to throw every B-movie cliche into a blender and hit puree.

The ambiguous ending was a neat touch, alluding to corporate corruption otherwise only discussed during the opening credits, but it felt unsubstantial, with no payoff for either the characters or the audience. We felt relieved when Sigourney Weaver finally killed that slimy slender thing in this film's most obvious inspiration, but here, we know what's going to happen, it happens, then that's it. Please exit the theater following the marked signs and dispose of any trash in the appropriate receptacles.