'Underwater' Movie Review

After an earthquake destroys their base of operations deep in the Mariana Trench, an aquatic research team (Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, T.J. Miller, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie) is left trapped, you guessed it, underwater. Now they must cross the ocean floor on foot to make it to another station in order to survive. Unfortunately, they aren’t alone down there, and they have no way of contacting the surface world.

Underwater’s premise is hardly unique. The concept of a ragtag group entirely isolated from the outside world being hunted down by a monster (or monsters) has been done in countless other movies, like Alien, Leviathan, and one of my favorite movies of all time, John Carpenter’s The Thing. One could even argue that many classic zombie movies could be included in this category. As a drop in said bucket, I thought Underwater wasn’t half bad. The film was co-written by Brian Duffield, who wrote the 2017 horror-comedy The Babysitter, which I quite enjoyed. It was directed by William Eubanks, who has directed two films prior to this, but I have not seen either of them. The script and direction are both decent enough, but neither are necessarily stellar. The curse of being so similar to other movies is the inevitable comparison, and Underwater just doesn’t hold a candle to some of its predecessors. The movie's biggest flaw is the camerawork. During some of the action scenes, the camera is far too chaotic to understand what’s going on. This is incredibly annoying, and those with motion sickness might want to sit these scenes out. Thankfully, this is only in a couple scenes, so it doesn't entirely outweigh the positives of the film.

The acting in the film is good. Nothing special, but good. It’s purely a genre film, so it doesn’t really rest on the shoulders of its cast (given that their purpose is mainly just to be monster fodder), but a good cast is certainly a positive. Kristen Stewart, who is unfortunately best known for one of the lowest points of her career, is really good in the film. She’s a much better actress than a lot of people realize, and while her character was almost entirely a ripoff of Ellen Ripley, she makes for a solid leading heroine. My favorite member of the cast is Vincent Cassel, a French character actor that, I think, doesn’t get enough recognition in English-language films. He plays the Captain, and he has exactly the right commanding presence, while still being very human. While three of the other crew members are not recognizable names, they also do a good job of making their characters likable. Now this film was shot before T.J. Miller’s indiscretions were known to the public, which is probably part of the reason why its release was delayed. But yes, our comic relief of the movie is Miller, and he honestly doesn’t add much. It’s clear that they let him do some ad-libbing, and most of it just seems out of place. He’s always been kind of hit-or-miss for me, but he was mostly just kind of annoying here.

The movie is ultimately saved by the inherent panic-inducing setting and the monsters. Being trapped at one of the lowest possible points on Earth is an absolutely horrifying idea. Even if the movie had completely sucked, that alone would have bolstered it to some extent. There’s an inherent claustrophobia to it, and that’s only made more nerve-wracking by the fact that each of our characters has a limited supply of oxygen. Now, one of the things in the trailer that sold me on the movie was the monster design. There was only a brief glimpse at one of the creatures in said trailer, but I loved the way it looked. It appeared just slightly more humanoid than most other underwater movie monsters, and there was something about it that felt particularly threatening. Upon finally seeing one of them in the film, they are pretty freaky. They weren’t quite as demonic as I expected them to be, but they still provided plenty of effective shocks, and the visual effects are solid. During the third act, there is an additional reveal that will probably divide viewers, depending on what kind of movie they were hoping to see. I, for one, thought it was awesome. It’s exactly what I want from a straightforward monster movie, so it satisfied me.

Underwater doesn’t make much of an effort to distinguish itself from the many superior films it resembles, but it also overcomes that hurdle by doing a great job of being that kind of movie. As derivative as it may be, it solidly delivers the claustrophobic thrills it promises.

SCORE: 4/5