UNDERWATER (2020) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

underwater (2020) movie

Genre              |   Action Horror

Classification   |   M

Running time   |   95 minutes

Released         |   23 January 2020

cast

Kristen Stewart ... Norah
T.J. Miller
Vincent Cassel
​Jessica Henwick ... Emily

director

William Eubank

writer

​Brian Duffield ... (screenplay by) and
Adam Cozad ... (screenplay by)
 
Brian Duffield ... (story by)

cinematographer

​Bojan Bazelli

music

​Marco Beltrami
Brandon Roberts

film editor

Brian Berdan
William Hoy
Todd E. Miller ​

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box office result

Worldwide               $50 million

Australia                 $? million

North America        $? million

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movie minutiae

​Shooting took place in the spring of 2017. By the time it released in January 2020, almost three years passed.

The film reportedly cost $65 million to make, but is being released in the doldrums of early January, the time when studios release troubled movies that don’t boast much internal confidence. GLASS (2019) collected an impressive worldwide total with a January release, and CRAWL (2019), another water-based creature-feature, managed to score big early in the year.

Kristen Stewart has been reported as saying, "It was not an easy movie to make — really long and just drippy and cold and f—ing hard. I want to see how we all reacted in such precarious circumstances. It really pulls out the best and worst parts of people."

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UNDERWATER (2020) MOVIE IMAGES

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UNDERWATER (2020) STORY SYNOPSIS

​Disaster strikes more than six miles below the ocean surface when water crashes through the walls of a drilling station. Led by their captain, the survivors realize that their only hope is to walk across the sea floor to reach the main part of the facility. But they soon find themselves in a fight for their lives when they come under attack from mysterious and deadly creatures that no one has ever seen.

UNDERWATER (2020) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 22 January 2020

Pop ​Movee Rating

When a film’s own Instagram page posts an image with a reviewer quote that screams that it’s “This year’s first, fun batshit-crazy movie”, you know that movie is not going to be a strong contender during the Awards Season...

In spite of any sensationalised social media posts, UNDERWATER is not a “fun batshit-crazy movie”. While much of what Director William Eubanks brings to the audience is derivative of much better Horror and Science Fiction films, there is an underlying pessimism rippling through UNDERWATER that attempts to illustrate the desperation that life itself clamours for when faced with ongoing, relentless uncertainty. 

Don’t be fooled into believing that the only reason to see UNDERWATER is Kristen Stewart. The former “It girl” for the teen-angst, blood-sucking cinema set may not be the above-the-line talent everyone thought she could become a decade ago, but, give her an inch and she knows how to take a mile and is more than capable of filling the top billing for a genre film like this one.

Stewart’s box office draw is where she seems to have a problem. On paper, the roles she’s played in the post-TWILIGHT period must have sounded like sure-fire winners, helping her to cash in on the fame that came with her presence as Bella Swan opposite Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen.

It’s not hard to imagine her agent coming to her with some outlandish proposals. For the most part, Stewart has been selective, but nothing has come close to replicating the box office success of the TWILIGHT franchise.

Jumping forward to the end of 2019, no one could have anticipated that the Stewart-led CHARLIE’S ANGELS reboot would fail to crack $70 million in global box office receipts. The two Barrymore, Diaz, Liu CA movies from the early 2000s grossed more than $500 million, so it stood to reason the Elizabeth Banks ANGELS project could go well beyond $100 million; surely?

The poor reception to that film must have led to a sinking feeling of regret as the words of Stewart’s agent echoed in her memory;

“Hey Kristen, do you want to be like Sigourney Weaver in ALIEN (1979), but underwater?”

How could she refuse.
In light of CHARLIE’S ANGELS, the answer should have been: easily.

Fortunately, Stewart knows well enough that if you’re going to be a “Star” then make sure you are THE star. 

As far as onscreen competition goes, besides Vincent Cassel, there’s no one in the film’s cast that can lay a glove on Stewart. Adding to the focus upon Stewart is the film’s need to capture most of the cast’s reactions in close-up, thanks to the large underwater diving helmets they’re required to wear for the majority of the film...

The only way to get a reaction is to stick the camera inside the helmet and wait for the actor to emote.

Writer Brian Duffield, who shares screenplay credit with THE LEGEND OF TARZAN (2016) writer Adam Cozad, must really like the ALIEN franchise as UNDERWATER  borrows quite liberally from that franchise to fill in the blanks required to complete the film’s plot.

Remote (alien) location/world…    Check.
Working class crew…                       Check.
Confined  settings…                         Check.
Shadowy corporation…                   Check.
Tough female protagonist…           Check.

If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then UNDERWATER is charming the absolute pants of the ALIEN franchise. Given UNDERWATER was produced in conjunction with the now renamed 20th Century (Fox) Studios, owner of the ALIEN properties, there seems little chance that the makers of UNDERWATER are going to get hit with a plagiarism lawsuit.

Duffield and Cozad’s script even goes so far as to limit the number of characters to nine; exactly the same number of credited cast members in the original 1979 ALIEN...

William Eubank, with great certainty, is definitely not Ridley Scott. He showed some great promise with the impressive, low-budget 2014 film THE SIGNAL, but UNDERWATER is his first directorial effort since that film and he makes some errors in how to capture the film’s external sequences, impacting the viewer’s visual recognition of key set-piece action sequences during UNDERWATER’s second half.

Eubank and Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli do a good job with the film’s non-underwater scenes, but there’s just too much murkiness whenever the action moves out into the underwater ocean floor sequences. Attempts to build suspense fall short time after time, as Stewart’s Norah and her colleagues become lost in a vast, literal ocean of black.

Like ALIEN, and another Monster classic PREDATOR (1987), UNDERWATER works best when the viewer can hear or “feel” a presence, but are not entirely sure what that presence is.

Anyone who has seen the film’s trailers will get a sense of what’s going on, but there is a sense of a genuine threat during the crew’s initial encounters with other life deep in the Mariana Trench. 

What really spoils UNDERWATER IS the ultimate reveal. 

The first two thirds of the film are relatively tense and could have gone in any direction…

The direction the writers and Eubank choose is completely ridiculous.

Instead of maintaining its efforts to follow the ALIEN template, UNDERWATER veers wildly into PACIFIC RIM (2013) territory and the film becomes figuratively water-logged as a result. Stewart is left to single-handedly drive the film’s finale, but her presence is not enough to compensate for the silliness the film descends into.

Eubank also fails to capitalise on the underlying “corporate skull-duggery” both the film’s opening and closing credits allude to. He was obviously trying to embed some SIGNAL-style conspiratorial elements into the film, but at no stage are these explored or even referred to in the film itself.

Given UNDERWATER has been releasing globally since early January 2020, the film’s box office would suggest that there’s a very long way for this hybrid Horror, Science Fiction tale to go before it comes even close to recouping just its production budget.

The upside of UNDERWATER  is the presence of both Stewart and Vincent Cassal. T.J. Miller supports with some forced, but largely unfunny lines. The film shows potential with the sequences set aboard the various ocean rigs the crew find themselves upon during their journey across the ocean floor, but the exterior scenes are not good enough for a film with this kind of budget and target audience.

UNDERWATER MOVIE (2020) USEFUL LINKS

Underwater (film) - Wikipedia
​Underwater (2020) - IMDb​
​Underwater (2020) - Rotten Tomatoes

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