Underwater

UNDERWATER - 20th Century Fox

William Eubank’s Underwater is the type of sci-fi/horror b-movie that populates multiplexes for the first few months of any given year. It is big, loud, dumb and features a cast of known and sorta-known faces. It is the kind of big-budget film that could have found a level of success if released twenty to thirty years earlier, aided by cable and video stores.

The film stars Kristen Stewart as a stock Ellen Ripley-type Norah Price, an emotionally withdrawn mechanical engineer working in the Mariana Trench for a mining company. The film wastes no time jumping right into the action following an earthquake that destroys the facility Stewart’s crew is on. The surviving crew members have to trek through a passage to find safety but quickly realize some creatures have been released as a result of the mining. The rest of the crew is rounded out by up and comers like Mamoudou Athie, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr. and acclaimed actor Vincent Cassel.

The script — playing like a half baked version of Alien mixed with The Abyss — gives all the actors very little to work with. No character is given real depth, aside from Stewart’s and Cassel’s characters — but even then, their backstories are thinly described. It is Stewart who takes command of her stock character, delivering every piece of lousy dialogue with the kind of confidence that shows she is more than capable of leading any action film or big studio film if given the right material and opportunity. 

UNDERWATER - 20th Century Fox

Many of the set pieces like the opening, involving the station decompressing, and later ones are shot and edited as if they belong in a Michael Bay venture. It is serviceable, and sometimes stylish, but the majority of the time it is aided by the ADHD editing — making it challenging to tell what is going on. It might come as no surprise that this film’s cinematographer, Bojan Bazelli, is no stranger to filming big studio films and also shot Bay’s most recent release, Underground 6. The sound design does little to help proceedings, playing by the Bay rulebook by being as loud as possible — often losing dialogue within the midst of the chaos. 

Underwater is forgettable from the moment it begins. This is a film that has been done many times before — and done much better. It takes itself far too seriously, rarely getting close to the so bad it’s still fun level that the material could have used. Aside from Stewart’s emergence as a strong contender to lead more action films, the most excitable factor about this is that the run time is only 95 minutes.

UNDERWATER is released January 10th (US) and February 7th (UK) 2020