In the Flesh: Underwater

Underwater wishes it were Alien. Its inability to shake that aspiration undercuts its own very, very modest charms in favor of chasing a standard the attainment of which is, by the ten-minute mark, plainly a pipe dream. Underwater is scattered, redundant, and fatally difficult to follow not because anything particularly inventive or challenging is going on but because director William Eubank apparently thinks if the camera isn't shaking around like an inbred chihuahua having a grand mal seizure there must be something wrong with the script. There are maybe two or three things worth looking at in a movie the primary appeal of which is visual from its casting to its concept. 

Yes, it is good to look at Kristen Stewart with that hair and those grease monkey clothes. Yes, Vincent Cassel looks appropriately weathered and tragic for the doomed captain of a ruined drilling rig. But the rest? Eubank's action is completely unwatchable, underlit and jerky with no sense of physical flow or attachment to the bodies of his actors. The cast aside from Stewart and Cassel are as bland as a line of Ken dolls, their stories even less appealing than their generic good looks. There is a film of enthusiastically dim-witted incompetence smeared over most of the movie's surface. It even misspells the word "buoyant" at one point.

Underwater's creature design is straight out of EVOLVE or DOOM. The welter of minor engineering problems encountered by the cast likewise echoes the time-filling busywork of poorly designed video games. The cast runs from underwater rig to underwater rig, navigating a few tunnels along the way and huffing into their suit mics so we know they're stressed out. Eubank repeatedly shoots Stewart turning her head inside her helmet, her profile rendered thin and anxious, but never thinks to use the fragility of that membrane to emphasize the abyssal ocean's vastness or the tenuousness of human life at such crushing depths. He never manages to solve the lighting problems inherent in his setting, and nor is his take on enveloping darkness interesting.

The movie is perpetually eager to get to the next thing, rushing from scene to scene without once pausing to confer weight or tension to anything happening on screen. The characters are likewise rushed productions, sketchy and bland. In a hilariously weak bit of writing the film's only two dramatic character beats are both "I have a dead family member." That more than anything explains the movie's tone, a sort of relentless creative banging of the head against a wall made up of much smarter, more beautiful, and more interesting movies. Clonk. Clonk. Clonk. Ah, well.