What does any good movie monster need to succeed? Well, besides several unwilling victims, a hero to defeat them, and a really cool but purposefully vague backstory, the perfect setting is the one key ingredient to any creature feature.
Luckily for the folks behind 20th Century Fox’s sci-fi thriller UNDERWATER, each of those required pieces are locked in tight and ready to put a crew of scientific researchers through hell in the most unexpected place of all: at the bottom of the ocean.
Following a massive earthquake that’s damaged their research station, the unsuspecting potential victims of UNDERWATER’s hellish escape will have to make their way through unforgiving conditions, and the hidden evil that waits in the darkness of the waters they inhabit.
And the damage we’re talking about isn’t just a broken door or some leaky ceilings. Though, we do see UNDERWATER’s troubles start with a small leak. But given that the bottom of the ocean is a severely more pressurized atmosphere of operation, even something that small can turn into an almost total collapse of the area that was habitable just five minutes ago.
So, if you thought fighting beasts of any shape or size was difficult before, try doing so on the bottom of the Earth’s ocean. With limited resources to keep UNDERWATER’s characters alive, and functionally nowhere to hide from the vague menace we’ve glimpsed in the trailer (which you can watch below), the options for survival are limited — but not totally gone.
With any killer ensemble piece such as this, there’s usually someone in the crew that the audience follows through the entire film, rooting for at the very least this protagonist’s survival. UNDERWATER puts those duties on the shoulders of actor Kristen Stewart in the role of Norah Price, one of the researchers who's fighting for their lives in the deep blue sea.
No stranger to action and adventure, Stewart’s protagonist almost feels reminiscent of another strong-willed survivor that had to face a rather alien evil: Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. So, while there’s nowhere to run or to hide for Norah Price and the crew she’s teamed up with in UNDERWATER, there are definitely enough humans to try and outwit whatever this creature happens to be.
With the new year, new, exciting genre fare like UNDERWATER is what we need to shock us at the movies. It's a tense adventure that sees humanity trying to survive in the deepest regions of our own planet, and there’s no telling who will survive and what will happen to the creature unexpectedly released into the wild.
You can check out the excitement that UNDERWATER promises to bring to an AMC near you on January 10.
