Movie Reaction: Underwater

Formula: Cloverfield / Alien / Deep Blue Sea

I like disaster movies, because they are really hard to mess up. Collect a handful of actors ranging from "can open a movie to $20 million dollars on his/her name alone" to "I think I remember him/her from an episode of SVU". Put them in a large scale devastating situation. Natural disasters are great. Precarious locations too. Then, give them a location they need to get to. The rest will figure itself out. A filmmaker can dress it up if they want, like Alfonse Cuaron did with Gravity. They can use it to build the myth of the leading man: look at most of Dwayne Johnson's movies. Or, they can just make really entertaining schlock. I'm thinking of Deep Blue Sea when I say that, but you can take your pick of hundreds. As long as it has those basic pieces though, it's hard to disappoint me.

So, I'll save you the suspense. I liked Underwater. It's the exact movie I signed up for. It starts with Kristen Stewart brushing her teeth while living in an outpost deep at the bottom of the ocean (the Mariana Trench, I believe). Before a word of dialogue is spoken, something goes wrong and she has to save herself when her entire wing loses structural integrity. From there, she picks up a few people along the way, including Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr, and TJ Miller, and they attempt to find a way to the surface. We get a few character details along the way, but no one really needs to be fleshed out. They slowly piece together what caused the base to fall apart (Hint: "There's something out there") and the get slowly picked off at a consistent rate. If you like disaster movies, there's nothing to dislike here.

Kristen Stewart gives the closest thing to a stand-out performance. She makes a character we know little to nothing about as interesting as she can. Everyone else gets more pronounced and obvious traits. I appreciated that the movie understood that the fight to survive is all the audience really needed to root for these characters. It also doesn't try too hard to explain how all the technology works or the exact nature of the threat. Each new obstacle seems sufficiently daunting and the way they get past them is sufficiently straight-forward.

This is nothing you haven't seen before. It's underwater Alien, basically. The presence of TJ Miller kept me thinking this would turn into a backdoor Cloverfield movie. If aren't a fan of disaster movies or feel claustrophobic watching things set underwater, then don't expect this to change your mind on any of that. It would be nice to get just a couple more character moments, however, I think the movie was intentionally going for the "strangers trying to survive" feel. I rolled my eyes a bit when the movie arranges for everyone to strip down to their underwear. This isn't trying to be high art. For a movie that's barely more than 90 minutes, I had no complaints. Hollywood, please let Kristen Stewart be an action movie-lead more if she wants.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend