Underwater Review: A solid subaquatic monster mash | SWITCH.
Tags: Sci Fi Movies, Movies, Thriller, Kristen Stewart, Horror

By Jake Watt

This article originally appeared on www.maketheswitch.com.au.

William Eubanks (‘Love’, ‘The Signal’) is a director whose science fiction films could all be summed up thusly: “surprisingly good given its budget”. ‘Underwater’ is his first big-budget effort and has languished on the shelf due to the Fox/Disney merger — it’s actually the final film to be released under the 20th Century Fox name before Walt Disney Studios changed its name to 20th Century Studios.

As someone who unabashedly loves movies about weird stuff happening underwater — ‘Sphere,’ ‘Deep Star Six,’ and ‘Leviathan’ — Eubanks’ latest movie was seemingly tailor-made for me.

Tian Industries intends to drill seven miles to the bottom of the Mariana Trench for resources. A large earthquake hits, and a section of the Kepler 822 Station starts to suffer a catastrophic breach from the pressure.

A mechanical engineer named Norah (Kristen Stewart) and a station crewman named Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie) scramble through the grimy, mucky wreckage. They find more survivors: Paul (T.J. Miller), a tattooed oddball who carries around a stuffed bunny for good luck; Emily (Jessica Henwick), a biology intern; engineer and Emily’s partner Smith (John Gallagher Jr); and the station’s dutiful captain, Lucien (Vincent Cassel).

With no escape pods left, Lucien recommends that they put on pressurised suits and walk one mile across the ocean floor to the abandoned Roebuck Station 641 — the film does a strong job of showcasing both the nearly suffocating claustrophobia of tight spaces and the vast emptiness of the environment.

Unfortunately, awakened by the incessant drilling, a race of spiny, gooey deep-sea Lovecraftian lifeforms with stretchy jaws have come out of the far depths.

The characters are simple archetypes — the captain with a tragic past, the comic relief, the useless IT guy, the scared rookie, and the cannon fodder. Kristen Stewart, her hair buzzed short and dyed blond, makes a credible Ripley-esque action hero, complete with high-top sneakers and tight-fitting attire.

Eubanks keeps the narrative brief and to the point, pitting his rowdy, tech lingo-spouting characters against a series of obstacles: a crawl through a corpse-littered tunnel, a walk along the ocean floor, defective oxygen converters, and the constant threat of decompression.

While the faster scenes are too chaotic to understand what is happening, what makes ‘Underwater’ so unique — and why subaquatic films usually struggle — is the literal sluggishness of its other action sequences. Characters descend elevators or ride brutally slow trams. The crew buzzes around in small robotic pods, their pace slowed by the water. That might not sound particularly fun, but Eubanks effectively captures every bump and turn; it’s a realistically awkward depiction of deep-sea travel.

Could ‘Underwater’ have benefited from being a one-woman show, K-Stew versus monsters versus her own haunted past? Maybe.

‘Underwater’ homages a number of films and owes its biggest debts to stuff like ‘Alien: Resurrection’, a film which plays like a collection of intriguing, half-formed ideas joined to the incongruous imagination of French fabulist Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Like James Cameron’s ‘The Abyss’, Eubanks snakes his camera through the behemoth of a cavernous underwater drilling platform and features a strong female character.

Underwater also owes something to video games, mostly ‘Bioshock’, using costume (armoured, steampunk-inspired atmospheric diving suits), environment (devastated, littered with clues) and sound design — like the prerecorded announcements that loop through station corridors — for both exposition and irony.

Still, a handful of things took me out of the film, a melodramatic voiceover bookends being chief among them, as well as the aforementioned incoherently fast action scenes. It also feels less like a William Eubanks film (often single character and heavy on flashbacks and the interior of the mind), and more of a collage of his interests. Could ‘Underwater’ have benefited from being a one-woman show, K-Stew versus monsters versus her own haunted past? Maybe.

Tense and fun, with cool creatures and jump scares that aren’t too obnoxious, ‘Underwater’ is disposable in the long run. But it’s also an entertaining and unpretentious true Hollywood B-movie that is worth a visit to the cinema.