Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Director: William Eubank
Quick Impressions:
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
That’s a paraphrase of some great dialogue from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland used by George Harrison (my friend’s favorite Beatle) in his song “Any Road.”
Learning that delightfully catchy song was my big takeaway from the movie Underwater. Mid-adventure, an Alice in Wonderland obsessed character played by T.J. Miller blurts out a variation of the line. My husband liked the sound of that enough to repeat it. Then we looked up its origins.
Apparently it’s a common paraphrase of Alice’s conversation with the Cheshire Cat when she’s lost. I was unfamiliar with the paraphrase (and the catchy George Harrison song), but I do love the Chesire Cat. (I mean, who doesn’t, right?)
And surely Alice could relate to the disorienting journey of this film’s hapless protagonists. She’s an expert on going down rabbit holes, after all, and they have to journey deeper underwater to make their escape, terrifying since they start out near the bottom of the Mariana Trench!
We considered seeing Underwater in the theater back in January, but there were still Oscar movies releasing in our area then. Plus the theater bombarded us with so many trailers and ads for Underwater that I thought it must be terrible.
But the fact that there are no new movies out in theaters now has made me slightly more receptive to the theatrical releases of 2020 that do exist.
And Underwater is not, in fact, terrible. It’s just terribly familiar. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But as I watched Underwater, I kept thinking to myself, I’ve seen all of this before…in a different life…back when there were movie theaters…
The Good:
Kristen Stewart is usually at her best when trapped in unexpected survival situations (see Panic Room, Zathura), so I expected her to be a good fit for this claustrophobic undersea escape, and she does manage to carry the movie. Her performance is good, and she looks great. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Stewart so flatteringly lit and photographed.
Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli makes her look like a true movie star. Practically every scene contains some intriguingly angled, gorgeously lit shot of her face, in close up or otherwise. (The amateur photographer in me envied the skillful shot composition throughout the film.) Though an ensemble of survivors fights to escape the deep, there is no doubt Stewart is the star of the film. The only slightly unfortunate thing is that visual homage so often invites us to compare Stewart’s Norah to Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, and the latter is incomparable.
Every actor in the film actually looks fantastic, and their surroundings are visually rich, too. Bazelli’s cinematography is the highlight of the film for me, followed closely by the art direction and set design. As long as the characters are inside, the visuals create a captivating, claustrophobic mood that makes us feel like we’re along for the adventure. (It’s less an adventure than a horrific nightmare, but still, you feel like it’s happening to you.)
It’s all pleasantly familiar, too. For me, the experience was like moving through an interactive queue at Disney World, and then the attraction turned out to be a showcase of my favorite scenes from sci-fi horror classics. The Alien franchise is honored again and again. (No matter which of those films is your favorite, you’re going to see a nod to it here.) But my family kept thinking of other classics, too. One scene reminded us of The Poseidon Adventure. At that point, my mom and I (correctly) guessed who would survive in the end. At another moment, my mother said, “This part reminds me of Pitch Black.” I noted, “They did say, ‘It’s going to be Pitch Black down there.'” I didn’t initially hear that line as a movie title, but it honestly could be an intentional joke. Director William Eubank clearly loves the defining films of the subgenre.
I found myself admiring the set design frequently, the cluttered, chaotic vessel interiors. I kept wondering where scenes had been filmed. (“Could they have used a high school locker room for this, or did they have to build it? Who found all these set decorations, or were they specifically designed and created for the film?”) Of course, a harsh critic might note that my obsession with the minor details of the sets probably reveals that the plot failed to hold my full interest. (It isn’t that interesting things don’t happen. It’s just that, unlike the characters, I’ve seen them all before and know how they usually come out in the end.) The movie does look fabulous though (as long as we’re inside).
I really love Vincent Cassel. He’s a great actor, and he has particularly cinematic facial features (the big, emotive eyes, the dramatic cheekbones). The camera gives him plenty of well lit close-ups which he makes the most of, too (though not as many as Stewart gets). His non-verbal acting is fantastic. In fact, I thought Cassel’s captain was the most fully realized of all the characters. Right away I had a sense of who he was, but I also had doubts. I was constantly re-evaluating my appraisal of him. (At one point, I felt deep regret for thinking something I’d suspected earlier, then seconds later wondered, “But was I entirely wrong to be suspicious?”) I felt like I really understood who the captain was (immediately), and yet I also began doubting myself about him right from the start. I also cared about him more than most characters.
I usually like T.J. Miller’s performances. My kids absolutely love his work as Robbie on their favorite show Gravity Falls. He’s in pretty good form here. I wish we got to spend more time with his character, to learn more about his quirks. (Now, admittedly, it’s possible that we missed some crucial bit of dialogue because while he was onscreen, we all kept talking fondly about Bill Paxton. This is one reason why it’s better to watch movies in the theater!)
Playing supporting characters, Mamoudou Athie, John Gallagher Jr., and Jessica Henwick are also good. Henwick benefits from increasingly interesting material. In fact, I think her Emily is the only character (aside from maybe Stewart’s Norah) who actually develops before our eyes during the movie.
I noticed Marco Beltrami’s name in the opening credits. I usually like his scores, but there’s actually little music in this. (What little there is, I did like.) At first I found this strange since the opening credits mentioned both Beltrami and Brandon Roberts. (As I watched, I thought, “How can you need two people to create this little music?”) But now I see that Roberts worked on A Quiet Place. Most of what we hear in the background is more euphonious sound than music–alarms, mechanisms, monster noises, oceany glurgling. I suppose that’s a method of scoring a film, too. I’m not sure.
I did think the movie had better than average sound overall since moments of threat never blasted out our eardrums, yet we could still hear the dialogue. (Of course, we did have the subtitles turned on. Watching at home is just a different experience!)
Best Scene:
By far best is the final scene with the escape pods. “Oh, it’s just starting to get good now,” I thought. “Finally! I’m invested.” The End.
Best Scene Visually:
Every scene inside the man-made vessels looks absolutely fantastic. The shots of the actors (especially Stewart and Cassel with their dramatic gazes) in their steampunkish suits gazing around the submarine would look amazing framed on the wall of a child’s nautically themed bedroom or printed in a book. I kept idly thinking, “Maybe this would be better as a silent movie.” (Of course, you would also shorten the runtime by cutting all the scenes I didn’t enjoy.)
I will mention one especially significant scene. Before any of the horror happens, Kristen Stewart’s character contemplates a Daddy Long Legs. (I got really distracted here, excited to tell everyone that I had just read in my son’s new science fact book from the Easter Bunny that the Daddy Long Legs is not actually a spider, though it is an arachnid.) But later on, I began to think the Daddy Long Legs might be of crucial importance and to wish I had not talked so much, so loudly over some of Stewart’s narration. I do think this scene and Stewart’s final scene beautifully bookend the movie. (I also wish that these were not the only two scenes to give us such insight into her character.)
When I think of Underwater now, I most remember two key moments centered on Cassel’s character. In the first moment, tension builds as we view a triangle of troubled faces. Later, we get a huge, entirely visual, rectangular reveal.
Best Action Sequence:
“The whole movie is an action sequence,” my husband observed. I think my favorite moment of action (aside from that punch in the nose) is the complication that arises for the last person to swim through the blocked corridor.
The Negatives:
The frequent nods to Alien are fine. Those films are classics. Why not acknowledge them, especially when Underwater features a strong, pragmatic, action-oriented female protagonist in the mold of Ellen Ripley and a complication caused by some creepy creature and its offspring?
But before long, this movie started to remind me too much of every other movie I’ve ever seen that featured at least one of these three things: 1) an inhospitable environment, 2) an incrementally revealed pursuing monster, 3) a desperate struggle to escape. If you’ve seen a movie featuring any of those elements in recent years, you’re going to see at least part of that movie again when you watch Underwater. Too many elements feel not just recycled, but also stripped down, more generic and less interesting than when we saw them on screen the first time.
The biggest problem with Underwater is that it somehow manages to be so much less than the sum of its parts. Inside the various mining structures, the visuals are excellent. The acting is, honestly, surprisingly good. Stewart and Cassel in particular are quite good actors in general, and T.J. Miller deftly adds bumbling comedy to every production he joins. The whole cast here emotes effectively and delivers their lines well. Occasionally, I thought, “This might work better as a minimalist play, stage nearly bare, Stewart, Cassel, and Henwick all dressed in black, obliviously trudging in criss-crossing paths, each delivering tortured monologues as they muddle through their private griefs.” The story has some promising aspects, too. The exposition and resolution we get crammed into the film’s book-ending credits sequences managed to pique my curiosity. At the end, I thought, “This seems set up for a sequel, even a franchise. But who would want one?”
The thing is, with so many aspects working so well on their own, I expected the movie to work better as a whole than it does. The failure of its solid (sometimes excellent) components to combine to make a good movie is actually far more frustrating than total, catastrophic disaster at every level would be. The stakes are so high for these people, and what they face is so awful. But in the end, we just don’t care. Too many elements are (way) too familiar from other movies, and we’re just not given enough of a reason to become emotionally invested in these characters and this story.
Perhaps part of the problem is insufficient character growth or revelation on screen. It’s not that the characters aren’t developed. In fact, I watched with the feeling that each actor had spent lots of painstaking time work-shopping his or her character. The problem is that we never get a chance to meet these characters before we have to say good-bye. (And the good-byes feel meaningless when we don’t really know the characters.) I wish the movie had spent a few minutes at the beginning showing us who these people are before their situation becomes so dire. (I mean, the major complication in this movie happens immediately! It’s so fast paced that the entire opening credits have to be overstuffed with exposition to provide the audience any scrap of orientation at all!) I didn’t fully understand the degree of one character’s obsession with Alice in Wonderland until five minutes before we never saw him again! What if we could have seen into his Wonderland sooner, maybe even learned what it meant to him in time to conjecture what it might mean for his fate? In most cases, the audience just doesn’t spend enough time with these characters to become attached (though it is clear the actors, and probably the writers, have spent a lot of time with them themselves).
Granted, some movies work really well with limited dialogue and lots of urgent action. Here the problem is, we’ve already seen those movies, and this movie is just copying them. As a result, Underwater isn’t particularly gripping, and we don’t get attached to these new characters in peril. In the Aliens franchise, you learn a lot about Ellen Ripley by watching the decisions she makes. These reveal the way she thinks, what she values, who she is. But in this movie, the action sequences reveal that the filmmakers have seen a lot of other sci-fi horror movies that we’ve already seen, too. That makes it hard to get invested. And, frustratingly, we never seem to learn anything important about these new characters until just before (or in many cases even after) they are gone forever. So why do we care about this story?
My other small complaint is that the visuals (so excellent inside the structures) become so horrible every time the characters go outside. Maybe this is deliberate visual symbolism, to show us how unpleasant and uncontrolled the environment is outside the safety of the man made structures. Maybe these sequences look better on a large, bright movie screen. But they looked pretty bad on our TV at home, and we have a nice TV. To me, these scenes all look dark and jumbled as if it were necessary to save a bit of money on special effects. But it’s more than possible that this is done intentionally and cost a fortune. (I don’t make movies myself. I don’t know.) The creatures are also extremely disappointing. I personally think the movie would be scarier if we didn’t see them. Plus, as with the human cast in the movie, just when the monsters start to become interesting, they’re gone.
Overall:
My mom summed up this movie pretty well when she remarked after it ended, “That reminded me of every other movie, but I think those other ones were better.”
Still Underwater has its strengths. As long as the characters stay inside, the cinematography is incredible with its gorgeously framed and lit shots and claustrophobic mood building. The performances are surprisingly good, and Kristen Stewart fans will be thrilled with the star-treatment she’s given here. Maybe this movie would work better as a picture book. The gorgeous shots combined with the premise and each character’s inner monologue seems quite captivating when I imagine it. In fact, I would buy that book in a heartbeat.