Underwater (2020) – Film Review – “Wading Into the New Year”
The more time distances me from this movie, the more I think positively of it. Nothing I’d buy on DVD, but I had a good time.
When I saw it, I wasn’t having the best of days, and, while I don’t like to attribute my given mood to my initial thoughts on a movie, I’m only human. The Rise of Skywalker was my last outing, before this one, and with 2019 going out on that fairly-comfortable note, I went into this level-headed. Only had seen snippets of the trailer…which is—honestly—the best way to go into something like this.
So…what makes Underwater a “fine” first entry of this new decade? Why, the state of affairs…
The world’s kind of in a funny place, right now; to someone like me, who doesn’t do a lot of keeping-up, I get my culture and my updates through social media and the Industry—sterling wells of knowledge and repute, I know. But, with the arc of the current MCU wrapping up, and every other studio sputtering for IPs or what to remake next, a pre-made release like this one is…fitting. The movie we deserve, right now.
All this pessimism and cynical eye-rolling, aside, the movie really caught me off-guard by how quickly it got into things. Picturing a typical set-up would include world-building, establishing a sense of normalcy, et cetera. Not here… Not five minutes into the thing, shit’s already exploding. At the very bottom of the loneliest place on Earth—the Mariana Trench—we’re introduced to our protagonist, a throw-away character I saw as a walking corpse the moment I laid eyes on him, and possibly the worst thing to happen to this movie: T.J. Miller.
He’s not very funny. He doesn’t add anything to the story. Removing him, completely, would just somber-up the atmosphere—make it better, I think. More grim, foreboding. Jessica Henwick (Netflix’s (now-defunct) Iron Fist and The Defenders) was a surprising addition. Her and Stewart have a lot of chemistry, on-set, and it shows in their characters. Vincent Cassel (Black Swan, Mesrine) could’ve been used to greater effect—more of an Ahab to this movie’s White Whale, but this isn’t so much a complaint against the movie as it is a persnickety preference. John Gallagher, Jr. (10 Cloverfield Lane, Hush)—the first hint this isn’t one of J.J. Abrams’s sly, “Mystery Box” insertions into the withered Cloverfield mythos—doesn’t do a lot, unfortunately, and is, more or less, a macguffin throughout the latter-half of the movie.
Kristen Stewart’s the main takeaway from this. She’s come a long way, since Twilight and the hunky older sister role I was crushin’ on hard, waaay back in 2005’s Zathura. A solid actress, she carries the movie—literally, sometimes, on her character’s shoulders. She’s our Ellen Ripley—our everywoman. Someone else, I don’t think, could’ve pulled it off; Stewart’s strength is in her subtlety, and it really grinds my gears I missed out on this past year’s Charlie’s Angels retread. There’s always streaming, down the line… Her arc is one I can empathize with, and is one of the standout Lovecraftian elements of this story: Her real and nihilist acceptance of the situation at-hand, and her role in all of it. Again…it’s all in the subtlety.
The sets are cool-looking. Very cramped, very 1979 Alien. That pseudo-futurism, looming sense of corporate free-thought-smothering, and dread with working in such a remote locale. So faceless are these Tian Industries guys (we don’t even get an Ash character to shovel all our disdain onto), they seem worse, more heartless employers than Weyland-Yutani—a statement that, even now, seems baffling.
The creature effects are cool, too. A lot takes place in the dark, so, if there is any kind of dating that came with the CGI, it doesn’t show. Adds to the atmosphere, more like. The score is minimalist, but a felt presence when called upon. Did not like how much they uses slow-mo, but—again—just another nitpick. Consider it airing my Festivus grievances.
I admired this movie for thinking it was made on less than an $80M budget, but not disheartened by the truth of its cost. Certainly not going to make itself back, unless good word spreads like wildfire in the kaiju-loving Chinese market, but neither did Ad Astra, and that film is nearly-perfect. Underwater is a good popcorn flick. Escapism, at its purest. Sometimes…that’s enough.
Final ‘Risk Assessment: ****/*
