Image credit: 20th Century Fox
Make no mistake, the Underwater subgenre of science fiction and horror belongs to the same family as the space terrors derived from Alien, the eighth passenger. Yes, in one of those movies they are in orbit and play with gravity, but in the abyss of the earth, there is an even more unknown space, because we have it below and we still don’t know much about it.
However, their rules in the movies are still something more or less similar and if in Prometheus they go from one ship to another in special breathing suits, in Underwater they come out with diving suits designed like armor from the Star Crusade board game. or Bioshock.
But it is acceptable to credit underwater films with their own aroma of saltwater and their decompression rules and floodgates that must be closed so as not to be swept away by the threatening and uncontrolled water pressure.
And this is what happens in the first minutes of the film by William Eubank, who offers here his most popcorn film, beginning with a declaration of principles in the form of a tribute to Jungle Glass that sets the film in motion without waiting for the classic scenes of a team of scientists and mechanics having breakfast while throwing pujas and we can guess who is involved with whom. No, here it starts with a bang and saves yourself, we’ll get to know them as they appear here and there.
Eliminating everything we already know is one of Underwater’s tricks to present us with the same old thing in a more or less fresh way. A group of members of an underwater base finds themselves in a disaster situation that leads to a kind of Poseidon adventure in the deep and, of course, with monsters.
Wait a minute, isn’t that the same premise as Deep Rising or Deep Blue Sea? Well yes, basically, and we already anticipated that it does not come close to that pair, which does not mean that it is not something interesting and very entertaining. The problem is that sometimes we know where and when certain things are going to happen since there are a good number of clichés that the script does not try to turn around.
In fact, there are times when it seems that we are seeing a remake of Depth Six, Leviathan, or, above all, The Rift, which already had some inspiration from the H. P. Lovecraft story The Temple. And although Pocholo is missing here, here we have one, increasingly divine, Kristen Stewart also blonde, albeit dyed, who plays an orthodox character chiseled from Ripley, with more than one visual homage with excessive moments in underwear included.
Eubank poses everything so well that when the time for the odyssey arrives, he falls a bit short in dealing with tension, not taking advantage of the dark water spaces with which films like 47 Meters Away (2017) manage to cut through the fear it generates.
Nor does it improve the use of CGI in all the aquatic exteriors that with 80 million dollars ask for a more dignified finish, especially when the creatures appear. The unlit cloudy water filter creates a vague haze which is no excuse and is probably the most disappointing considering the good visual finish of all interiors and the return of some dirt to the production design normally absent in this kind of slightly pasteurized blockbuster for the 13-year-old audience.
This makes its intermediate zone suffer from the initial impulse, although the final stretch recovers some muscle and gives way to a few minutes that are pure conceptual astonishment, taking the story beyond its small conception of a vehicle for its protagonist, thanks to a fantastic factor that will leave any lover of the genre speechless.
Best: Kristen Stewart as a living anime character, her willingness to have fun from minute one, and her ghastly conclusion.
The worst: she cries out for more blood, the CGI, and the diluted suspense of the central section of her.