Underwater: Barotrauma

To be honest, it's pretty damn hard to find pictures of this film, but on the list of things that could have been done better more pictures is awfully low on that list.

Last week I managed to see Underwater, and it was quite a confusing film, mixing new and unique things in a horror film that I haven't seen before (or in a while) with some truly baffling production choices. It was a film that I found both entertaining and frustrating in equal measure, and it really just felt like a film that was still in the process of figuring out what exactly it was supposed to be. I've never understood my friends' dislike for TJ Miller characters before, but needless to say I understand now, and he's just one of the strange choices that the film made in regards to its execution. Without further ado, let's talk about Underwater, a film that can't seem to decide what brand of horror or adventure film it is.

Beginning with the plot, Underwater goes through several shifts, but throughout it remains a tense and uncomfortable story. For roughly the first fifteen or twenty minutes Underwater is something genuinely interesting: a disaster movie at the bottom of the sea where the pressure is in the tons. I honestly liked this segment a good deal, for not only did it showcase a genre that seems to have gone the way of the dodo, but it was genuinely tense and suspenseful (like anything could happen). The second part of the film is an adventure-horror I guess? I honestly found it hard to tell what was even going on (partially due to the water being as black as pitch) or how to gauge the situation. Is our group in deep shit, or are they safe? How strong are these creatures? They could break open the main habitat no problem (as they did at the beginning of the film), but now they seem balked by a small submarine elevator? Why did they start attacking now of all times? Nobody knows, and I wish that they gave us a tiny bit of an explanation regarding these creatures. The closest one we get is that a few strange accidents happened during the construction of this deep-sea drill rig and that there have been the odd strange shape seen around, but that's not a proper introduction. You could put Michael Myers in this and it would have the same amount of background as these things. Eventually then we get to the finale, which is as close as we get to true horror with our survivors becoming lost in the dark of the deep blue sea as they're at their most vulnerable, and it nearly becomes the highlight of the film except it just drops the ball at the finish. At this point we see the full hand of the film's story, and it's kind of disappointing even as dramatic reveal after reveal is thrown at you. It was just overwhelming, I never got a chance to fully process anything. If you're going to introduce some Cthulhu-looking thing, surely it could have come earlier than the last fifteen minutes? The hero at the end sacrifices herself and it's played like some big cathartic self-sacrifice moment, but this is literally the first time that she has even seen the big monster, and her sacrifice feels closer to a coin-toss than anything else. It's a misplay, and the characters are little better despite the small cast. To tell the truth, they're not a very likable or enjoyable bunch. Some of them, like the central character, IT guy(?), and the radio technician(?) are somewhat likable and the captain is, dare I say it, actually interesting. He's actually a person that I want to know more about, and though we do learn about him eventually, it still didn't quite dispel the strange feeling of mystery about him. The other two characters however, the technician's fiancé and his best friend, are nigh intolerable. His fiancé spends, no joke, about half of her runtime is her having an episode and it really doesn't do the film any favors. Not to be outdone, the technition's friend, TJ Miller playing a guy, is perhaps the most jarring thing in this film. He's constantly cracking these strange and inappropriate jokes that even had morbid-humor-loving me quite irritated whenever he'd speak. They're not even clever jokes, just utterly weird. It just didn't fit at all, and I don't think I laughed even once.

To be completely honest I did not expect Kristen Stewart to be that good, since I only knew her from the Twilight films, but man, she's nowhere near half bad.

In terms of the stuff in the background, Underwater is also quite strange. There were many shots throughout the film of the main character by herself (like she was the only person around) despite being in a group with other people. It honestly made me think that this was at one point a single-person film, and I'm just not sure what happened because this could very easily have been a one-woman show. There was also this roughly ten or so minute-long sequence of the hero, having been separated from the group and reached a point of shelter where she spends a good deal of time investigating, jury-rigging, and crying, and it felt like something pulled out of the single-woman (or with the captain) cut of the film, which there isn't by the way. It's just so strange. There were also some strange camera techniques like found-footage documentary shaky-cam used, and it didn't make any sense given the fact that nobody is carrying a camera in this film. There's also a bizarre amount of exposition delivered through montages of newspapers at both the beginning and end of the film. I haven't really seen something like it in a while, but at the same time I think that it could have been done much better with an opening/closing text crawl or something along those lines. Besides those though, there's a lot about the costumes and visual effects of Underwater that I liked a lot. First, the diving suits that our group of survivors wear are pretty reminiscent of the CMC powered combat suits that the Terran marines of Starcraft wear, and they look nothing short of badass (even though their occupants are nothing short of badass). Second, the creatures that attack are pretty cool, and they don't just do mindless jump scares, there's a certain curiosity/malign playfulness to their movements. Third, the film actually captures how dark the bottom of the sea is, and truth be told, it's more than a little unnerving how oppressive the darkness coupled with the sound design is. You also see a guy die from the pressure of the deep, and it's as horrific as it sounds, I liked that, even though it was probably the last time the water's pressure was relevant. It's a pretty unique "mechanic" to the film, and even though my feelings on the rest of the film are mixed, it definitely depicts the bottom of the see with fantastic aptitude (though we could have also seen some of the strange life down there too, but oh well).

Man, I love fictional engineering, nothing quite hits that lizard part of my brain like it, and these suits actually look somewhat probable within my lifetime to boot. Hell yes indeed.

My closing thoughts on Underwater is that it could have been a relatively unique horror film, but as it stands it's rather mediocre. Whatever unique and notable things it does well are equalled by poor, puzzling, or otherwise unentertaining choices that drag down the film. I liked parts of it, but I wouldn't recommend it to other people at the end of the day. So I guess I'll add it to the pile of unexciting/bad sea-based horror films that will hopefully be the exception rather than the norm one day. At least it's better than Jaws 3, low bar that it is.