William Eubank’s subaquatic horror film Underwater feels familiar: A group of researchers stranded in one of the most isolated, unfriendly environments known to man fight for their survival against both their surroundings and terrifying alien creatures. It’s the lite version of Ridley Scott’s seminal space-horror movie Alien, by way of the deep-sea survival horror game Soma.
Underwater is a diverting knockoff, but it isn’t as deep or as cohesive as its apparent inspirations. Soma builds an increasingly gripping story as its protagonist moves from one undersea site to another in search of a way of escaping a ruined Earth. Underwater makes that journey the entire story, sending its characters across the ocean floor, seeking a route to the surface, while dressing the action in Alien’s clothing.
There’s barely any preamble to the film’s dive into disaster. Underwater opens with an underwater drilling station experiencing an apparent earthquake. Norah (Kristen Stewart), a mechanic who just barely saves the entire station from going down, and Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie) are the only survivors from their branch. Together, they venture into the rest of the station, seeking other survivors and the escape pods that will get them back to the surface.
The final party adds Paul (T.J. Miller), Emily (Jessica Henwick), Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), and the Captain (Vincent Cassel) to their ranks. They each fulfill a familiar role — the Captain is stoic, Emily is panicky, Paul cracks jokes — and none of them reveals much backstory over the course of the film. They don’t really need any backstory to be cannon fodder for the sea monsters that have been awoken by their deep-sea drilling.
The dialogue is mostly rendered inaudible by clanging and alien noise. When the lines are comprehensible, they’re the kind of faux-tough nonsense an action figure might spout, almost a parody of action movie tropes. (“Let’s light this shit up!” etc.) Screenwriters Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad suggest that humanity’s greed in drilling into the ocean floor for energy is to blame for the plague of monsters. “We aren’t meant to be here,” Emily says of the underwater base. But the writers aren’t invested in justifying their metaphor about our current environmental crisis; they’re just using it as a backstop for endless action. Underwater owes more to the recent Godzilla movies than Alien in that respect: It feigns depth by punishing humans for trying to play God, but without any sense of insight or story resonance for that message.
The action suffers a little from the dark of the deep-sea setting. In sequences featuring more than one character dressed in a diving suit, they become indistinguishable. But cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (A Cure for Wellness, Pete’s Dragon, The Lone Ranger) still keeps it all looking slick. Individual scenes are dominated by eerie colors — largely greens and blues — and the final reveals, as monsters seem to materialize out of the darkness, are impressively spooky.
On the other hand, the attempts at injecting comedy into the proceedings seem to have been ported in from an entirely different movie. (They also feel like they come from a different era, since Miller, who was accused of sexual assault in 2017, arrested for a fake bomb threat in 2018, and has since largely disappeared from the industry, is the primary source of the movie’s comic relief.) At its worst, Underwater feels cobbled together from “fun” parts rather than made into a cohesive whole. The jokes, the allusions to real-life crises, the occasional “kick-ass” needle-drop — they all come across as having been added in to satisfy some action movie checklist than to actually add any depth.
With franchises dominating the action landscape, and new movies largely setting out to ape past successes (see: the inescapability of Ryan Reynolds post-Deadpool), Underwater seems made for the moment. The filmmakers seem to be trying to update Alien for what they think audiences now want, prioritizing action over story and adding unnecessary humor and feigned interest in the current sociopolitical climate. And along the way, they naturally set up a possible sequel in the movie’s final moments.
Stewart, as the film’s main character, fares best compared to the rest of the cast, given how little there she has to build on. She’s the deep-sea budget equivalent of Alien’s famous Final Girl, Ripley, right down to a shot in which her face and a monster’s mandibles are just inches apart. Of all the cast, she gets the most to work with, because she’s allowed to express more than just one emotion: She uses her naturally knit brow to project both determination and desperation.
But the real attraction of Underwater is in rooting for these characters to survive while watching them get torn apart. Their deaths carry little weight, trading pathos for the fun of watching helmets implode and suits fill with blood. At points, the film’s flimsiness is laughable: A diagram estimating the range of an explosion shows that it’ll go just far enough to destroy monsters, but not the people escaping them. But Eubank always moves on quickly, bringing on the next set of undersea scares.
Underwater also shares some DNA with movies like Armageddon and The Abyss, where a group of workers are pitted against alien oddities in outer space or underwater. But it’s a stripped-down version of those science fiction predecessors. Just as Norah is budget Ripley, Underwater is essentially budget Alien, from its baby alien design to its narrow ship corridors and sense of total isolation. What it lacks — concrete characters and a compelling story — it attempts to make its audience forget by pelting them with action. Like so many recent reboots and sequels, it isn’t its own movie, so much as it’s a reminder of how spellbinding the original was.
Underwater is in theaters now.