The Message Behind ‘Underwater’
Kristen Stewart gazed into the abyss and you won’t believe what happened next…
The new science-fiction horror movie Underwater is a surprisingly good “trapped in a spaceship with a murderous alien” movie, only it takes place six-miles beneath the surface of the ocean in an elaborate drilling station and instead of an alien, it’s mysterious frog demons.
The defining example of this kind of movie is Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien. Both these movies also feature a heroic woman who never loses her cool, even while fighting for her life, and the life of the crew, in tight-quarters. Sigourney Weaver, in a culturally-significant performance, plays this role in Alien and in Underwater, the honor goes to Kristin Stewart, an intelligent and unpredictable actor who has fully transcended the teen vampire movies that made her famous.
But there’s another movie Underwater borrows from and that’s James Cameron’s forgotten epic The Abyss, which is The Godfather of “drama under the waves” movies. Does anyone remember that flick? Cameron filled an empty nuclear reactor with water and shot a movie while wearing SCUBA gear.
Underwater is mostly Aliens, but it salutes at The Abyss, a movie that theorizes a race of benevolent hyper-advanced neon jelly people lives in the deep sea…
