Underwater (2020) Review

Is new creature thriller Underwater worth your hard earned cash? Here’s my Underwater review bubbling up for your amusement.

The film stars Kristen Stewart, TJ Miller, Vincent Cassel and Jessica Henwick and is directed by William Eubank. Now showing from 20th Century Fox PH and exclusively showing in SM Malls.

I came in with just that one trailer from the Fox Facebook page. I knew this had some potential but I didn’t expect it to be good. The plot is also simple. A bunch of survivors try to reach safety and go from point A to point B while being stalked by something they haven’t encountered before (Predator called, he wants his plot back).

First off I’d like to say that it had the same tone as past films of the genre like “Life” and the grandfather of them all, “Alien”. It had so much tropes similar that it’s hard not to see similarities. At the same time, we also had a lot of fresh stuff here including one of the characters actually thinking straight and telling her teammate to leave the creepy thing alone. Of course there won’t be a movie if that would be the case so suspension of belief comes into play.

Kristen Stewart was awesome here. She’s channeling Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in a few scenes and I love it. She does compensate a bit with her look in the film.

TJ Miller is up to his same shenanigans here. Nothing new honestly. He does add some levity to some scenes and he does lighten up the rather tense scenes.

Jessica Henwick (Game of Thrones, Iron Fist) is the surprisingly likeable character here. Her character plot is the one that grows the most and we actually see that unfold.

Underwater worked well for me because it puts the tension and the suspense first before characterization. And while the movie could have done great if they had more, it surely didn’t suffer without.

And speaking of tension I have to give mad props for the creature designs in this movie. They did not rip off the Alien franchise and instead opted to design good ones. The musical scoring and sound design was excellent too. Rarely have I seen an undersea flick that played with the auditory senses and heighten scary moments.

For this Underwater review, I’d like to say that the film is already easily one of the surprisingly good films for this year. I am wondering though why it took 20th Century Fox such a long time to release this.

Two gripes I have for the film are as follows. The dialogue suffers from time to time. Like I could hardly understand the first few dialogues between Stewart’s Price and the character named Rodrigo. I really went “what the hell are they talking about”. It’s like they were eating what they were saying.

The second gripe is my constant one. The shaky camera, the bane of my existence, is still here. It worked twice but for the rest of the picture, I feel like it hurt it instead.

Underwater Review – Verdict

8/10