Underwater

My Last Of Us 2 review is going to take a while (only halfway through the game) but to tide you over, have this post about a mediocre horror movie.

Underwater is a blandly-titled movie from earlier this year that’s frequently described as “Alien but at the bottom of the ocean”, based largely on its aesthetic and the fact that the trailer was just blatently ripping off Alien’s. Set maybe in the near future-ish, the movie follows several crew members of a massive mining operation at the bottom of the Mariana trench after a disaster compromises the hull and weakens the enormous structure to the point of collapse.

Setting off across the sea floor to reach a distant base where the last remaining evacuation pods are, they discover that spooky underwater creatures are stalking and killing anyone who tries to escape the facility. You see, the Wayland-Yutani-esque amoral corporation that runs the drilling endeavour dug too deep, and in the process they awakened…Chthulhu.

No, really. The big final boss creature spawning the fish monsters is literally, actually Chthulhu. This is only lightly implied in the movie via some vaguely eldritch scribblings and the fact that the big monster and its spawn are a little too human looking to just be sea creatures, but the director has stated explicitly that the monster is Actual Chthulhu, making Underwater a very loose adapation of The Call of Chthulhu. This doesn’t really add a whole lot to the movie, besides giving it the distinction of featuring probably the highest-budget CG version of the famous Old One yet seen on film (and one that diverges pretty heavily from the usual “giant humanoid with an octopus for a head” visual). Personally, I think the creatures just being some unknown species of deep sea marine life would have been a lot more interesting. The addition of eldritch horror to the story also raises the stakes in the last act in a way that isn’t really earned, as the characters come to the conclusion that the sea monsters might pose some threat to the rest of the world based on not much evidence (unless they’ve read the director’s interviews as well).

Underwater’s aesthetic similarities to Alien are extremely apparent just from glancing at the movie, but the similarity actually ends there. Alien is well known for actually being quite and slow paced and taking a lot of time at the beginning to to introduce the characters, but Underwater doesn’t have time for that shit. The drill station starts imploding mere minutes into the movie, and after that the story basically doesn’t slow down for a breath. Given this, it actually does a very good job of fleshing out the characters and making them distinctive. I’ve seen much slower-paced movies botch this, so well done Underwater for that.

Unfortunately, the plot that those characters are acting out isn’t up to much. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the bottom of the ocean, but it’s quite dark down there and there’s a lot of stuff floating around (it’s called marine snow, if you’re curious). As such, much of the movie consists of murky footage where it’s at times difficult to tell what’s going on, or close-up shots of the actor’s faces inside their helmets. As is often the case with modern horror movies, the monsters are a huge let-down when you finally get a clear look at them.

There’s a semi-interesting strand going through the plot of the characters suffering psychological confusion—which the opening exposition attributes to the spookifying effects of being under the sea, what with all the crustaceans and formations and the like, but which I guess could be Lovecraftian in nature—but this doesn’t really amount to a whole lot.

It’s not that Underwater is bad exactly, it’s just very unremarkable even taken as cinematic popcorn. If you’re looking for a slice of high-tension underwater horror then it does that, but not much else.