UNDERWATER (2020) ★ ★
"Underwater" is confusing, boring, derivative, and frustratingly close to greatness. Every genre aims to have a specific effect on its audience, and thrillers are meant to thrill. "Underwater" has all the right elements in place. It takes us seven miles down to the depths of the Mariana Trench. It puts its characters in a Ridley Scott-inspired tech-scape of depressurization chambers and seemingly endless corridors that wouldn't look out of place in a Hans Giger painting. It even has a worthy cast of mostly young and sexy people to throw around for ninety minutes. So why doesn't any of this thrill me?
Remember how "Alien" allowed us to familiarize ourselves with its characters before the aliens show up? Remember how well that leisurely first part worked when contrasted against the terrifying second and third acts? I had a problem with "Underwater" three minutes into watching it. The opening scene involves a scantily-clad Kristen Stewart as Norah Price, a mechanical engineer aboard a deep-sea research facility owned by Tian Industries. She plays with a spider that fell in her sink. This mundane situation had me thinking I'd be given at least twenty minutes to get to know Norah. Maybe even thirty minutes, if I was really lucky, exactly enough time for me to start caring about her.
This is called pacing. It's an essential ingredient to what makes a thriller thrilling. "Underwater" is pretty bad at pacing. A minute after Norah liberates her spider, she notices a leak coming from a hallway ceiling. About ten seconds after that, the station begins imploding around her. Water crashes in from all sides. Norah runs frantically. Music pounds. Camera shakes. She's abruptly joined by Mamoudou Athie, who plays pretty much nobody in particular, just a guy running with her to some unclear destination, presumably a safety zone. They barely make it. There's an explosion. The two are knocked unconscious. I expected Norah to wake up from a premonition-style dream, and for me to reclaim my thirty minutes of getting to know her, and the rest of her crew mates. I needed it all to be a dream.
No such luck -- this is no dream. It dawned on me that the film was actually going to proceed with an all-action approach, right from the first moments, and as the minutes wore on it also became clear that I'm supposed to care about characters that appear on screen, simply because they're on screen. Stewart and Athie, who apparently plays a Tian employee named Rodrigo Nagenda, continue to scamper along collapsed corridors and flooded sets with wires and flickering lights everywhere, and they pick up T.J. Miller as Paul Abel, another random survivor. They bump into Vincent Cassell, who plays Lucien, the captain of what appears to be their architecturally unsound research facility (we're never given a satisfactory explanation of what caused the catastrophe). He leads us to two more random people, and all of these randos then engage in one tedious and protracted escape scene, which is essentially the entirety of the film.
I couldn't bring myself to care about anything that was happening, because I had no idea who it was happening to. Who are these people? Writers Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad clearly had no idea, and decided it didn't matter. They figured that cranking up the music and creating visual circumstances where water threatens to kill everyone was enough to keep audiences interested. Their gamble was almost entirely a lost bet, except for a few things that kept me awake, and jolted me back to coherence. For one thing, the visual effects are superb. The attention to detail for everything, from the dive suits to the weirdly swirly (and very Giger-like) wall design in one of the command rooms, was quite good.
About midway through, "Underwater" decides it's a creature feature, and invites us to consider a bevy of humanoid monsters that are apparently responsible for at least some of the station's damage. They lead us to an interesting creature from an H.P. Lovecraft story, which I'll let you discover for yourself, should you be inclined to see this film. Unfortunately I cannot recommend seeing it, not because I think it's bad, but because its elements are strong enough that better writing would have made it great. When characters should be revealing key points of interest about themselves, they're frantically adjusting diving helmets and screaming about whatever bizarre thing is happening to them in the moment. When a hero's journey should be emerging from amid the din, the hero remains anonymous, which renders her journey meaningless.
Dropping a Lovecraft character into the abyss might have heightened the intensity of this thriller, had there been any people around for it to terrorize. But "Underwater" is a movie without people. It hosts the barest sketches of its characters, and none possess a shred of personality or a unique identifying trait. During those rare moments when an actor was alone on screen, I nearly nodded off. Never a good thing.
--- Bill Fontaine
