2020

'Underwater' (2019) Review: Jawlien When Martin Scorsese compared superhero movies to theme park rides, he did so attracting the ire of fans the world over. Though his comments weren’t unfounded, I couldn’t help but find them reductive. A theme park ride has little to no story, character types instead of characters, and the plot is centred around the action rather than any meaningful message or character arc. Superhero movies aren’t like that, but ‘Underwater’ certainly is.The movie opens with a catastrophe, wasting no time getting to the meat of the matter. ‘Underwater’ seeks to give you a survival experience that’s visually arresting. You’re following a group of crew members at an underwater research station that has mysteriously started to flood. Their only hope for survival is to walk across the ocean floor, armed with nothing but their wits, and some high tech scuba suits, to a neighbouring station. To make matters worse, something seems to have awoken beneath the depths, and it has an appetite for scared survivors. Watching the movie I definitely felt a sense of dread. The situation the characters are in strikes the right level of hopelessness. The movie presents a number of problems for the characters to solve, and takes joy in showing you how that’s done. I found myself invested in the details, rather than in the characters themselves. Most of which don’t offer much to go off of. The dialogue is hard to hear at times, leaving…