Directed by:
William EubankCinematography:
Bojan BazelliCast:
Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, T.J. Miller, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie, Gunner Wright, Fiona ReneVOD (3)
Plots(1)
After disaster strikes miles beneath the ocean's surface, a deep-sea research crew faces the monstrous consequences of what their drilling has unleashed. (Netflix)
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Reviews (14)
William Eubank has made an homage to 80's underwater horror but it's nothing more than B-movie entertainment. The film is nicely shot, the monsters are awesome and it moves along very quickly, which are major pluses, but it bothered me that it shuffles its feet in places a lot of times and the climax didn't really engage at all – many times I didn't even notice who died and how, as the film was mostly in the dark and that bothered me quite a bit. The suspense and atmosphere didn't really work for me, and the monsters are only shown at the end, which didn't please me much either. With a more interesting filmmaker this could have been a modern day Event Horizon, this way it's just a fine addition to the genre, but it soon fizzles out. 6.5/10.
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If there was a glut of underwater monster horror films in the cinemas, I may have complained that Underwater has poorly drawn characters, that the space and the action are sometimes hard to navigate, and that it doesn’t bring anything new to the sub-genre. But given that the last in any way comparable competition is 1989’s Leviathan, I won’t be a douchebag. And it’s also nice to go to watch a horror flick with a sea monster and get an excellently crafted genre film that doesn’t waste time and jumps right into an intensive action, basically the moment the lights in the theatre go out. The money can be seen. Eubank has once again proven that they can manage the visual aspect of filmmaking with panache. In terms of ambition, however, Underwater is probably the most mundane of their filmography, but this is certainly to the benefit of their cause. But for me, the main plus are the best designed monsters far and wide.
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An entertaining underwater horror b-movie that paces and looks great from start to finish. However, when it slows down a bit at times, it turns out that all the characters are terribly simple and flat and you don't really care who lives to see the end credits. Most of the time, though, it has a very solid pace and the result is an above average underwater variation on Alien. If you're missing something similar at the cinema, definitely don't resist Underwater. Don't expect a revolution, but the above average craftsmanship isn't lacking either.
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Although Underwater is a mish-mash of everything we've seen many times in other horror movies set under-the-sea (DeepStar Six, Leviathan) or in space, like a taster for the genre in which something constantly happens from beginning to end, it still kind of works. The screenplay features perhaps all the clichés of similar stories and contains a lot of holes in logic that could easily be unraveled if you want - but I don't want to. I guess I somehow let myself be lulled into following the movie for the revelation of the monster at the end, which seems to have fallen out of the stories of an unnamed author. The more one thinks about it, the more one thinks of how the movie could have been better if it had been worked on in a few places. Also, the reluctance of the creators to let the viewer breathe in silence on a dark wave after the end of the movie clearly undermined my experience, instead, they forcibly pasted a disgusting modern pop song over the end credits. This movie balances around a gray average.
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The best thing about Underwater is Kristen Stewart, and that’s not an exaggeration. The unusual image suited her speech very well. And the pop song in the closing credits is confirmation that the main intention was to draw in her fans. Atmospherically, the film works quite well and the way it dynamically draws the viewer into the plot is outstanding, but it gradually runs out of gas and shuffling around on the place is supposed to unleash the mediocre monsters. The motif of the environmental threat of drilling into the ocean floor isn’t exactly innovative and there is nothing here to make it anything special, so it just remains a worn-out cliché.
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