Underwater

✭✩✩✩✩ THE jump scares are all wet in Underwater, a waterlogged Alien clone that is as narratively perplexing as it is visually incoherent.

A Slim Shady-haircut sporting Kristen Stewart stars as a mechanical engineer on board a research vessel some 10km under the sea, which springs a leak so quickly into the film that I thought the projector had been bumped and skipped ahead 30 minutes.

There’s no time for character introductions let alone development – we’re thrown immediately into crisis mode. If Stewart’s character and the rest of her crew – including Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr, Mamoudou Athie and T.J. Miller, who provides comic relief no one asked for – don’t abandon ship in giant wetsuits that look like spacesuits and trudge across the ocean floor to a sister station, they’re all sleeping with the fishes.

That situation would be tense enough as is, if Underwater cared at all about its human characters. But director William Eubank is here to deliver a horror movie, which simply trades outer space for the ocean and follows the Alien model as his crew runs afoul with an assortment of deep sea demons. No creatures burst out of anyone’s chest, but Underwater attempts to one-up the gag by having a character blow through one of the baddie’s backs. Progress it’s not.

There’s a soggy message in here about man messing around with Mother Nature that is blown to smithereens by the powder keg finale. Underwater was shot three years ago and is just coming out now, on the heels of Stewart’s flop in the Charlie’s Angels reboot. It’s not doing her, or anyone else, any favours.