**This post contains MINOR spoilers**
The Story- Norah (Kristen Stewart), a mechanical engineer at an underwater research and drilling facility, rushes to safety after a sudden disturbance causes severe damage, killing a number of her fellow crewmates. Led by Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel), Norah, Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie), Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), Emily (Jessica Henwick), and Paul (T.J. Miller) all struggle to survive with a limited number of escape pods and resources. Captain Lucien’s solution? Walk across the seafloor of the Mariana Trench to the Roebuck Station using special hi-tech suits.
The risky mission takes a bizarre turn, when the crew realizes they’re being hunted and picked off by deadly creatures. Pushing forward is the only option, as the crew carefully travels to Roebuck, and Norah is forced to make a difficult decision.
My Thoughts- Kristen Stewart’s performance as Norah truly encapsulates how you would expect someone to react to an unprecedented situation, especially a situation that involves vicious monsters. The anxiety, torn emotions for making tough choices, and the emotional weight of realizing you might die, without a funeral or a proper burial. Norah is compassionate, selfless, and scrappy, the unlikely heroic character, who has to push through one brutal loss after another, when she realizes she can’t save everyone.
Vincent Cassel delivers a solid performance as Captain Lucien. Lucien, the leader, who strongly prioritizes the safety of his crew over everything, including his own well-being, while constantly trying to reassure the crew that everyone will make it out alive.
The rest of the crew? It’s a familiar set of characters you’ll notice from other similar horror films. T.J. Miller’s Paul is the jokester and the comic relief character, who’s obsessed with Alice In Wonderland (he also carries around a stuffed rabbit). Emily freaks out and panics at the first signs of danger. John Gallagher Jr. has a healthy sense of humor as Liam, just a step below Paul for laughs, as the guy, who lightens the mood after, or during the more serious moments throughout the movie.
Underwater is a strange case for me. The movie is set 2050, creepy and menacing creatures, and the BIG reveal towards the end for a legendary creature is a good jaw-dropper. But there’s just something missing in Underwater. Considering the material they had to work with, there’s a noticeable lack of oomph, or consistent sparks here.
One problem for me is they relied on one too many jump scares. That, and outside of Norah and Lucien, the rest of the crew features too many thin characters. Also, I was hoping they would’ve explored the obvious coverup from the company, and the moral dilemma about drilling in the ocean, something Emily touched on earlier in the movie.
But Underwater is still a solid and entertaining sci-fi horror film. Underwater quickly bursts out of the gate, because the chaos starts within the first ten minutes. There’s a good balance of running from and fighting off the creature’s attacks, and the crew sharing heart-to heart moments with each other, or joking around, allowing the story to breathe, when it needs to at certain points.
Norah and Lucien’s relationship is one of the bigger highlights in the movie, with Lucien relying on, trusting, and pushing Norah to believe in herself. A strong sense of claustrophobia in tight spaces, some decent laughs, a good amount of genuinely tense scenes with the creatures, the attacks, and the main characters waiting for the right moment to make a move, fight back, or escape. The methods used for the deaths and the kills are kind of repetitive, but there’s still a lot of brutality for a PG-13 horror film, toeing the line for the necessary squirmy reactions, without needing graphic levels of gore and gruesome kills.
And I can’t say enough about how much I loved the ending. Predictable with how everything played out? Yes, but the last stand still packs a strong enough punch to get the job done.
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