It’s Alien, but with submarines
Underwater (R13, 95 mins) Directed by William Eubank Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★
It seems to me that nostalgia runs on around a 30-year cycle. Every generation, finding themselves middle-aged, declining in energy and maybe with a bit of spare in the wallet, starts to get all misty-eyed about whatever music and movies they liked most in their teens and early20s. Thirty-odd years before.
Which explains a great deal of New Zealand radio programming, and maybe, why a horror movie about a sea creature attacking an underwater base has suddenly shown up in our cinemas, almost exactly 30 years after The Abyss,
Deep Star 6 and Leviathan (all 1989) were cluttering up the nascent multiplexes of our fair land
Or, to put it another way, you wait ages for a decent movie about sea monsters to show up. And then one completely fails to show up. Which is a shame, because
Underwater does tick a lot of boxes. The plot? Just think ‘‘Alien, but with submarines’’. Sorted.
Kristen Stewart is an actor I respect very much. Apart from the
Twilight franchise – which at least has made her richer than a minor go, and thus able to turn down any film she doesn’t want to do – Stewart has been good-to-great across a range of roles.
From being Jodie Foster’s daughter in Panic Room to a superb title role in Seberg (opening next week in New Zealand), Stewart has been a consistently unflashy, but rock-solid performer, as long as she’s cast in the right material.
But in Underwater, a film that shouldn’t aspire to be anything more than dumb fun, Stewart is far too cerebral and detached.
Around Stewart, Vincent Cassel (Black Swan), Jessica Henwick (Iron Fist) and a cast of several, are all fine, right up until the water, or the monsters, do them in.
Underwater does a lot of things right. And some individual sequences do look astonishing – cinematographer Bojan Bazelli is an industry legend – but this is mostly a muddled, rushed and over-complicated thrash at a genre that needs clear and concise storytelling to really work.
You wait ages for a decent movie about sea monsters to show up. And then one completely fails to show up.