Survival thriller is a rock-bottom ripoff
In the numbskull lab scene in the soggy new monster movie “Underwater,” scientists and gearheads use a pen to prod a razor-toothed thingie they found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Haven’t these fools seen “Alien”? This thingie is a twin of the chest-burster from that film, and we know how that turned out.
The people poking the beast, resembling the working scruffs who became prey in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror classic, include electrical engineer Norah Price (Kristen Stewart), whom we immediately clock to be this film’s plucky “Ripley.”
Norah is the kind of whiz, seen only in movies, who can fix a fritzy computer system by turning a couple of screws and banging the screen. She wears glasses, but amazingly acquires 20/20 vision once she loses them. She’s as tough as a missile — check out the shaved blond noggin, buff bod and steely gaze — but sensitive enough to save a spider from being flushed down a sink. We know she’s important, she’s the only person in “Underwater” with two names.
All swell breaks loose one night, as Norah is brushing her teeth aboard the Kepler Station mining rig, seven miles below the ocean’s surface. Is it an earthquake, or something to do with those freaky unexplained sightings reported in the newspaper-montage prologue?
No time to ponder, as water pours in and everything starts to explode. Norah and systems manager Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie) shimmy to relative safety, later to meet up with other survivors: Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel), operations expert Smith (John Gallagher Jr.), and marine biology student Emily (Jessica Henwick).
They also find welder Paul, played by T.J. Miller, briefly trapped beneath rubble that makes for a nifty metaphor about Miller’s recent career. Paul, the “resident smart-ass,” tells terrible jokes and carries a stuffed bunny rabbit that stands in for Jones, the pet cat from “Alien.”
So far so squishy for “Underwater.” If the clueless Kepler crew haven’t seen “Alien,” or “The Abyss” or innumerable other extreme epics, director William Eubank (“The Signal”) certainly has. So have screenwriters Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad, who candidly admit their influences.
The film’s one novelty (I’m feeling generous) is the dodgy decision to attempt to walk across the ocean floor to a nearbut-far abandoned mining rig called the Roebuck, which may still have working escape pods.
To get there means getting past a giant fish stew of sea monsters prowling for human flesh. Seems those freaky sightings we heard about earlier held water, and a lot of hungry teeth.
There are the makings of a decent survival thriller in “Underwater,” but everything gets tossed overboard by the disorientation of the rest of the movie, which just isn’t all that scary.
Part of the blame belongs with the script. We don’t know much about Norah and even less about her crewmates. The “plot” is just derivative nonsense, including the tacked-on environmental message.
“We shouldn’t be here!” Emily shouts.
If she feels that way, why is she working for a nasty giant corporation that is tearing up the ocean floor?
The main reasons for the ennui are visual and aural. The camera never provides a good look at the attacking monsters, who seem to be half-baked CGI renderings filched from other flicks. There’s just a lot of thrashing around in the peagreen soup of Bojan Bazelli’s cinematography.
The sound is more sketchy: random shouts are almost drowned out by the drums-ofdoom score by Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts.
When you can’t properly see or hear what’s going on, the natural human instinct is to cease caring and to root only for the end credits.
No stuffed bunny rabbits were hurt in the making of this film. Your brain cells may be another matter entirely.