A Modern Retro Creature Feature: Underwater
Under the sea with Kristen Stewart. And monsters.
In 1989, there was something in the water, and that something was a bunch of people. In that year, there were four movies about undersea research and mining facilities: Lords of the Deep (the most disliked, directed by Mary Ann Fisher, a producer for Roger Corman), Deepstar Six (the most watchably average of them), The Abyss (the biggest budget, directed by James Cameron), and Leviathan (my favorite). There were probably others that I missed, but four seems plenty. Over the years since then, there’s always a filmmaker or two willing to take a dip in those waters again every couple of years—so often in fact that when you find out undersea labs and facilities aren’t a real thing (other than Aquarius, which is small and mostly there to train astronauts), it’s pretty disappointing. It’s sort of like when I was a kid and learned that small flying subs launched from larger regular submarines weren’t a real thing. How can something in both Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and UFO) not be real??
Of the more recently made undersea lab movies, Underwater is closest in spirit to the films of the 1980s in that it eschews the modern film’s tendency to be overwritten (yet often underbaked) and stuffed full of backstory and subplots, and instead, like the recent Predator movie Prey, strips away the fat and concentrates on a single core story. The material is there for it to dwell on conspiracies and cover-ups, but those are relegated to snippets of newspaper headlines during the credits, leaving the movie itself to be about a group of people in an extreme situation trying to get from dangerous point A to slightly less dangerous point B. Oh, and also monsters are chasing them.
Kristen Stewart (Charlie’s Angels, Personal Shopper) stars as a mechanic on a deep-sea mining complex. The film wastes very little time demolishing the rig, leaving Stewart and a smattering of survivors (including Mamoudou Athie, who is underused; TJ Miller, who is overused because for me any TJ Miller is too much TJ Miller; Jessica Henwick, who is always a welcome face; Vincent Cassel, also always welcome; and John Gallagher Jr. as the white guy) to make their way through the collapsing rig toward a separate facility that promises moderately more safety and, more importantly, functioning escape pods. Unfortunately, the facility necessitates a complicated journey by foot along the ocean floor with limited survival resources. Oh, and also monsters are chasing them.
In true 1980s action form, the characters are basic sketches who succeed largely because the three most important characters (Stewart, Henwick, and Cassel) are likable. The film dials down the bickering and yelling that so often puts me off movies, and despite a few disagreements, they basically work together sort of like a classic group of Howard Hawks characters: a bunch of competent people in an extreme situation, doing what they can to figure it out. As was the case in the 1980s, the root influences are Alien and Aliens, mostly. Mostly. But it’s not a retread (for that, I suggest Bruno Mattei’s Zombies; The Beginning). Screenwriters Brian Duffield (who co-wrote another of my favorite recent creature features, Love and Monsters, also in 2020) and Adam Cozad (who co-wrote Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which I thought was pretty good) keep the story focused, don’t wander off into the many potential subplots, and as a result, keep it pretty intense.
With any movie about deep-sea drilling, there’s likely a political message to be communicated about climate change and damage to the environment. Science fiction/horror is a genre well-suited for exploring such questions, and while they’re present in Underwater, it’s not a front-and-center issue, not in a film this streamlined. The characters all agree that humanity has apparently screwed up pretty bad, but that’s about as deep as they drill. There’s not much time for moral reckoning and philosophy when the situation is so desperate. Which is fine with me. I already know where I stand on such issues (humanity has definitely screwed up pretty bad).
Director William Eubank has a background in cinematography. Like Duffield and Cozad, he didn’t come to Underwater with a ton of experience, but he knows what he’s doing. For the most part, he avoids the temptation to “immerse” us in the action with the too-abused shakey cam and other tricks that I find to be less immersive than simply framing the shot and getting on with it. The cinematographer, Bojan Bazelli, does have a considerable resume, stretching back to the low-budget Russell Wong action film China Girl (1987) and including Pumpkinhead (1988), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), and the American remake of The Ring (2002). Oh, and A Gnome Named Norm, of course. He lends the film a steady, sure hand. When camera motion is employed, it actually works to create a sense of disorientation (aided by the naturally disorienting environment of the deep, dark ocean) and is effective precisely because it’s not employed throughout the entire movie.
The monsters, when they reveal themselves, are also pretty great. I was prepared for another in a long line of “hey it’s dogs but with, like, tentacles) that has become the go-to design for monsters lately. Instead, Underwater goes a different, more surprising, and more unsettling route. The creatures are humanoid, vaguely mermaid-esque—but mermaids by way of the cave creatures in The Descent, or the Fiji Mermaid. Although glimpsed only fleetingly, it’s a much more interesting design than another tentacle monster. There’s another, much larger monster (it’s not exactly a surprise—something ripped the facility apart) for the finale that exists somewhere between Cthulhu and the Balrog from The Fellowship of the Rings.
The only complaint I have is that they hired someone as good as Mamoudou Athie and then didn’t take advantage of it. Ah well, that’s casting for you. I’m still around for anything he shows up in (I loved Archive 81, for the season we got), and I will always show up for Kristen Stewart and Jessica Henwick. All in all, a pretty satisfying adventure that feels not so much like a retro homage to the underwater monster movies of the 1980s as it is simply one of them.