Underwater (2020) Review - SPOILERS

I only just watched this the night before writing this and given the film's main antagonist (if you could even call him that) I felt I had to comment.

I am what you would consider a medium sized fan of H.P Lovecraft's 'Cthulhu Mythos'. I've read a fair few of the most famous stories; 'Call of Cthulhu' of course, a titan of 20th century horror literature; 'The Dunwich Horror', not too far behind CoC in it's inimitable status (and hopefully to be adapted by Richard Stanley soon); 'Dagon', the quintessential Lovecraft tale; and of course 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', perhaps the most adapted and imitated of Lovecraft's stories, at one point even made into the video game 'Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth', a game so nerve wracking I've yet to pick it up again since I was chased through a hotel by gangs of hammer wielding, bug-eyed fish men with only book cases to defend myself with. 

Video evidence of the reason AR-15s with chainsaw attachments should be considered a human right. 

I heard of the film 'Underwater' starring Kristen Stewart a while ago and despite my love for horror in isolated spaces (John Carpenter's The Thing, Alien, Event Horizon, Prince of Darkness) my interest in this was pretty flaccid. I'd already gone through the derivative 'Life' starring Jake Gyllenhaal a little while before and with a similarly banal title like 'Underwater' I expected little of anything different. 

Seriously though, what is it movies nowadays with boring, unimaginative titles? 'Life', 'Spy', 'Underwater'. Yes, the film is set underwater, very good. It's like if 'Dead Calm' called itself 'Boat' Have we actually gotten to the point where we have to make use of generic, monosyllabic titles to describe our thinly veiled rehashes of older movies? I imagine in the future we'll be going to see 'Ubiquitous Marvel Film #3467' in our grey jump suits, shoveling down mouthfuls of energy depleting government issue gruel. Mark my words, this is the first step towards NPC cinema. 

....

So anyways I decided to rent the film from Amazon Prime and it's because I happened to find out who the main threat of the film was and no it wasn't Kristen Stewart's pronouns.

It's SIR to you, shitlord.

As you've no doubt gleaned from my second paragraph - the film's antagonist is Cthulhu. Yes, I'm not kidding. Not something that looks sort of like Cthulhu or some homage, it's actually Cthulhu. And he looks good. Clearly he's been working out, what with the lockdown and all. But try to imagine this for a second, because I know it will be hard for you.

Imagine making a movie with Cthulhu; Heavy C, Grand Master Octo-Dragon Man, Mr Insane in the Cosmic Membrane Nightmare Tentacles himself... and doing almost nothing with him.

I know, it's incomprehensible to you. For once we have a mainstream movie that portrays Cthulhu as anything more than an ironic punchline for literature-bereft hipster nerds and they do pretty much nothing with him. He's just there. He roars a little. That's about it. And before anyone gives me shit for being annoyed that Cthulhu didn't snap up T.J Miller and eat him like a chocolate bar (although that would have increased the film's quality exponentially) that's not my problem. I find it more problematic that Kristen Stewart's character was able to look upon the Kraken of Dreams without her brain melting and oozing out of her pale skinny ass like the slugs from 'Dreamcatcher'. Yeah, remember that movie? Well I fucking referenced it. How about that, huh? 

*Fart. Plop*

As it happens her ass is probably the most appealing thing about this movie. It starts off with Kristen Stewart's character, Norah, delivering a morose narration about how there's a comfort in cynicism and how her career as an Annie Lennox tribute act never really took off. Shortly afterward the underwater research and drilling facility she's in (what in fact they are researching and drilling for is never brought up) starts to fall apart due to what initially appears to be an underwater earthquake. SPOILER: They soon realize that they busted in on Cthulhu having a wank and now he mad AF.  

So what's the problem? Sounds like your kind of movie, GLENN. Why you gotta be so picky, HUH? What did you do with my daughter's body, MONSTER?

All valid questions. My problem is mostly that, like 'Life', it's a generic horror film that's derivative of the aforementioned 'Alien' and 'Event Horizon' type films that had their own ideas and actually made use of them in some memorable way. Not only that, in this generic horror film, they decided to use one of the towering horror icons of the 20th century and then proceed to not use him in any way shape or form. It goes through the motions. They walk around in the dark, get chased by Deep Ones (basically Fish-Apes), T.J Miller says something ironic while playing with his stuffed rabbit toy.... Wait, why did he have that? What was that about? Nobody says anything about it. It's never explained. Was it just there to make his character more quirky? At least Nicolas Cage in 'Con Air' had a reason. 

  
Point is there's nothing original here and given that they have no ideas that relate in any way to the Cthulhu Mythos, it makes me think that the writers are cursorily aware of Cthulhu but have no real idea as to what he actually is or what he does. Personally I was hoping for scenes where Norah's friends and colleagues slowly start going insane, engaging in ritual behaviour and start becoming Cthulhu worshipers, carving weird symbols into their skin and sexually assaulting each other in pools of briny slime. That would have been cool. A Cthulhu cult in a vaguely sci-fi underwater setting.

But we didn't get that. We got a rehash of a hundred other modern horror flicks that just happens to have Squid-head Schwarzenegger in it. Eventually I just resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to get what I wanted and started waiting for the moment Norah got Cthulhu cancelled for something mildly racist he said about Shoggoths around 10,000 years ago. 

Didn't even get that either. Just another needless, dreary narration.

Overall Quality Rating - 2.5/5

Whilst the film never truly makes proper use of the idea of humans stumbling upon Cthulhu in the process of vague corporate bullshit, its direction is solid and it does manage to create an isolated and claustrophobic atmosphere with the environments and cinematography. This is probably helped by the fact that I have a fear of drowning and quite frankly FUCK the deep sea. 

Look at that. That's not CGI, that's fucking real. There ought to be a fucking law. Yet further argument that the 2nd Amendment should be expanded to include amphibious tanks and underwater adaptable mini-nukes. 

Aside from that your characters are largely unmemorable and Stewart continues her dead eyed acting technique from the 'Twilight' films. T.J Miller is the Ryan Reynolds of the crew, providing comic relief and Jessica Henwick (Colleen Wing in 'Iron Fist', and I'm sure she regrets that every day) does some decent work here and provides some eye-candy for my East-Asian fetishizing peepers. 

Idiot Rating - 1/5

Unfortunately I can't even recommend this for the sake of unintentional hilarity. The film takes itself uber-seriously beyond T.J Miller's quips and little in the way of ridiculous events occurs. Look elsewhere. 

Ultimately what this film sorely needed was Sam Neil screaming at things. 

I'm DeadEye, and your daughter's body tasted delicious.