Movie Rant – Why I hated Underwater

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2 responses to “Movie Rant – Why I hated Underwater”

1. 

   Dan Gardner

   January 26, 2020

   Sounds like a movie that relies on cheap scares and not on character. As you mentioned, there’s been many movies that got this right. I’m curious what the process is for making a bad movie, as opposed to a good movie. Where does it start to go off the rails?

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2. 

   Jill Florio

   January 26, 2020

   Excellent question, Dan. I was thinking about another movie this was done right – Deep Blue Sea. A perfect B film; an extremely enjoyable outing (from 1999, even) where this same exact story is told RIGHT. Some great actors help hold it up, but they aren’t ultimately crucial to the narrative. The underwater set is a standout feature, and I don’t know why Underwater couldn’t replicate that.

   https://howditgo.app/deep-blue-sea-movie-review/

   Also, The Abyss did this same kind of ocean floor thing and made me care about each character, with very little side-plot meandering. I cry every time I watch the girl in Abyss as she drowns in terror to save the guy (and hopefully herself). “You never ran from anything in your life!” I almost wet myself the first time I saw when the Titanium ring saves the lead fellow…when the rat almost gets left behind…when Micheal Biehn succumbs to the pressure of the depths…see? These are OLD MOVIES I am suggesting. Pitch Black was out in 2000. Aliens is, what, 30 years old now? Yeah, 1986.

   How come these old-ass films did it right and a 2020 movie fails so hard?

   Kristen Stewart really isn’t to blame here, although she has exactly two expressions in Underwater, just like Twilight (is that a thing with her?). And her co-stars are…I don’t even know. One guy was like a low-rent Hudson from Aliens (hey dude, spit out the gum when getting enclosed in a depth pressure suit).

   Honestly, a walk on the ocean floor 7 miles down the Marianas Trench should have been a stand-out set piece. Instead it was littered in specks and flotsam and lacked any real sense of dread.

   Remember how in Aliens we saw the Marines get ripped to shred via their video cams and life support monitors? THAT WAS HOW TO DO THIS. A creative form of battle exposition. When Gorman (see, I know these character’s names) falls to pieces watching the monitors, and Ripley decides to step in, I cheer every time. You go girl! She’s also terrified beyond rational thought, but she does what a person should do in extremis, and saves what’s left of the team. I get chills thinking about it. “Stand down, Ripley. Stand down.” Excellent stuff.

   I think Underwater is just lazy. It touches on the standard beats and is content with that. It’s like Lightspeed Skipping. 😉

   And the sacrifices don’t feel earned because I don’t understand the backstories. I think they were mentioned, but the movie was hard to understand, and it shouldn’t be my fault that I walked out non-plussed.

   Another example of doing this right: A Quiet Place. We don’t even get a definitive answer to what the creatures are (some prominently shown newsclippings efficiently give us enough to chew on). We don’t need to actually know, because the characters don’t, and we CARE about them.

   Even the silly but fun Escape Room from last year did a last-man-standing story right, and it was basically a throw-away movie that surprised everyone by being good.

   So, after a long detour, to answer your question about when Underwater went off the rails…hmmm. The beginning is good. Things in the drilling rig start banging and booming quickly. Dread builds when we see the first death and first critter. When someone asks if this is a “baby”, I started to get gripped. This is after my actual yelp moment (I screamed out loud. I don’t think I’ve even done that in a theater before).

   Maybe it’s because it was filmed so close to Stewart’s face, ostensibly to increase the feeling of claustrophobia. I guess. But the sets should have been better used here as she went from safe port to safe port. She even has a “Gravity” moment that works okay. You’ll know it when you see it.

   I think it’s because the writers didn’t bother to give the characters anything to do besides be monster-bait. When someone is dragged across the ocean floor, I didn’t care by then.

   I’m not going to go into the creatures, because fuck it. Honestly, this would have been a better film without them. Try this: the undersea rig falls apart (earthquakes) and people have to get to the ocean floor to get back to the surface and survival. They have to do a space walk to get to an abandoned outpost and figure out the next step. This would be good enough for a whole movie (see: The Martian)! Even the Titanic tells this story, knowing that we know how it ends, and does it with power and passion. Apollo 13 tells this story. How do you survive when the odds are staggeringly against you and the environment is painfully lethal?

   The more I think about this, the more I want to give Underwater a D grade.

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