The scenes on the ocean floor – equally reminiscent of similar deep-sea survival horror in the under-appreciated Soma video game as well as Alien’s trek across the surface of LV426 – are effective but the sheer amount of taking suits off and putting them back on again gets repetitive. If you’re not invested in Underwater after the first half-hour then the second act section, where the group (and their kit) slowly progress from one base section to another, won’t bring you back in. Every third line seems to be about escape pods, deep-dive suits and carbon scrubbers in a way that reminds very strongly of The Abyss, although there’s nothing in Underwater quite as memorable as that film’s aerated liquid breathing system. Underwater is much less concerned with the intricacies of character than it is with how these relatively stock characters react to (and try to survive) the ongoing disaster. Whether that matters too much is arguable, though. They all sort-of-not-really know each other, in the ambivalent nodding way that you sort-of-not-really know Lucy from Accounts, in a way that contrasts poorly with the well-oiled camaraderie in Alien’s opening scenes. It’s difficult to catch character names, largely due to the film’s muffled dialogue, and none of them have much of a personality beyond Abel being hugely irritating. Unlike Alien, however, Underwater is not very good at introducing us to its characters to the extent that it barely bothers. We know what will happen here and we know it won’t be good. The air is saturated with steam and the strange, booming noises of the abyssal ocean. Fluorescent lamps flicker and crackle as the clatter-chatter of poorly-maintained computers echoes from server rooms. Corridors are cluttered with cabling and tacked-up corporate safety notices. Kepler 822 is the kind of industrial facility that would have been cutting edge a few years previously but is now starting to fray at the edges.
Like Alien, Underwater is very good at introducing us to its environment.
Add in Smith (John Gallagher Jnr) and Haversham (Jessica Henwick) as the inevitable couple and that’s us introduced to the cast. Abel quickly reveals himself as the kind of insufferable joker – possibly a coping method for a Haunted Past – that nobody would want to live with on a deep-sea base. Norah Price (Kristen Stewart), an engineer with a Haunted Past, quickly meets up with Lucien (Vincent Cassel), the station captain with a Haunted Past, and miners Nagenda (Mamoudou Athie) and Abel (TJ Miller). Indeed, the film only manages a little less than ten minutes before Things Go Horribly Wrong Kepler 822, a mining station at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, suffers a catastrophic depressurisation which kills many of the crew and leaves the few survivors fighting for their lives in a rapidly worsening situation. If this doesn’t interest you then you may as well stop here but if it does then I should also probably warn you that Underwater is less than the sum of its parts, but we’ll get to that soon enough.īeyond any of its influences, though, Underwater is very much a Things Go Horribly Wrong film.
#MOVIE ABOUT HAUNTED SPACE STATION PLUS#
Let’s get this out of the way first Underwater is effectively Alien plus The Abyss plus Event Horizon, sprinkled with a handful of other sci-fi horror garnishes. Will Underwater (directed by William Eubank) change this trend? We can only find out by suiting up and diving in. Even the finest example of aquatic horror, Jaws, is more about staying out of the water than going in. Yet, beyond a handful of notable examples, the ocean never seems to work for horror films. The ocean isn’t ours, it seems to suggest, but space could be.
#MOVIE ABOUT HAUNTED SPACE STATION FULL#
Even the word thalassophobia, the fear of the ocean and its teeming contents, feels unpleasantly full and slithery in the mouth. Not just with the immense pressure of water but with the strange, alien creatures we already know live there and the even stranger creatures we fear might live there. The ocean, on the other hand, is already crushingly full. Is this why space seems more attractive for exploration? Space is terrifyingly empty, but at least it holds the tantalising possibility of being filled. Worse than that, we live on a handful of precarious rocks poking out of Planet Ocean. Clarke realised, we don’t live on Planet Earth. The truth of this is debatable – it’s a slight exaggeration of a quote by oceanographer Paul Snelgrove, “We know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about ”, but we do know surprisingly little about something which covers the majority of our planet’s surface. It’s often claimed that we know more about deep space than we do about the deep oceans.
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