Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A group of scientists/soldiers (stop) are stuck in an underground/underwater/outer space facility (really, stop) when their equipment gets damaged (fucking stop) and they are hunted by a monster (good god, fucking stop!). It has been 41 years since Alien was released, but we still get Alien knockoffs like it was only yesterday. I wish I knew how much time I have spent watching scientists being stalked by a monster through dark corridors, and Underwater is here solely to add to that total. 80% Alien, 20% The Thing and 100% shit that I have seen a million times before in better movies, I feel like Underwater was actually released on VHS in the early 90s and I was tricked into watching it in a theater in 2020.
Actually, to be more specific, this feels like a lost film from 1989, a year when music taught us that every rose has its thorn and movies taught us that the ocean is trying to fucking murder us. In that year, two aquatic Alien ripoffs were released: Deepstar Six and Leviathan. The similarities between those movies are fascinating; they were released months apart, they have nearly identical plots, sets and running times and both star someone from Robocop. Now I know that a third such script was written at that time, but the world would have to wait a couple of decades to behold its glory. We were just not prepared for the blandness of Underwater at that time. Just for the sake of completeness, The Abyss was also released in 1989, but that’s more of an eight-hour movie about underwater valve repair than anything else.
I’m skirting around the specific plot of Underwater because this film defies memory. Some scientists (maybe a soldier is in there too, I don’t know) are in an underwater station looking for natural resources on the ocean floor. Their facility gets damaged, because the facility always gets fucking damaged, and they must figure out how to survive while they are also stalked by mysterious monsters. The next 90 minutes are boring, predictable scenes of people walking through dark corridors. Sometimes they encounter a jump scare, sometimes they yell something vaguely nautical-sounding about a hatch that needs to be fixed or some shit. We finally see the big monster and a character makes a selfless move to destroy the monster and save humanity. Just like in Deepstar Six. And Leviathan.
It’s not that Underwater is a retread, that bothers me, it’s that it doesn’t do anything particularly well. It’s not scary. It’s not well-paced (it feels like it starts mid-film, but then goes nowhere). It’s not well-shot, as most of the underwater action scenes are difficult to follow. The characters are generic and forgettable. The PG-13 rating doesn’t allow for anything in the visceral or cheap entertainment category. The whole thing just goes through the motions, taking the script for Alien and making slight adjustments when necessary, and not giving me a goddamn thing of interest to talk about. It’s like a film school thesis on blandness that I can’t even muster the energy to get mad at.
I can say a couple of nice things about it. Kristen Stewart is in this for some reason and gives one of her better performances. Stewart typically underacts to the point that I’m concerned that she will lose consciousness, but this is perhaps the most engaging that I have seen her. Playing the Ellen Ripley role, Stewart shows that she could pull off the reluctant badass role quite nicely if she was given some better material. The final monster is also more ambitious than what one usually finds in these movies. Inspired by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, it makes me wonder how much more interesting this movie could have been if the script wasn’t just a bunch of clichés wrapped together with duct tape.
I have already largely forgotten that this movie exists. However, it’s memory will live on as the answer to one movie trivia question: What was the last movie released under the banner of 20th Century Fox? The studio that released the original Alien has gone out with this pale imitation as their takeover by Disney is complete. And now I’m sad.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_(film)#/media/File:Underwater_poster.jpeg
