UNDERWATER

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Glug, glug, glug... These things always go in cycles so it's hardly surprising that sooner or later someone would resurrect the marine base horror movie: just like Alien except on the sea bed instead of outer space. They could just as easily have been set in moonbases or space cargo freighters: bickering crews, lots of corridors and airlocks, clunky protective suits and flashing warning signs. But the fact is if you're old enough to remember James Cameron's The Abyss, you can probably remember the knockoffs floating in its wake, the most notable being Leviathan and Deep Star Six and thirty years later we really haven't moved on very much.

Underwater is pure monster hokum: seven miles down at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, following some violent unspecified quake, the hull integrity drops to a worrying 70% on a massive gas drilling rig, and a handful of survivors have to make their way across the sea bed, in near-total darkness and with limited oxygen, to another station hopefully equipped with escape pods. But they are not alone down there, and that wasn't a natural earthquake...

Kristen Stewart has close-cropped hair and wears glasses because she's an engineer, but she also gets to wander round in her pants because it's essentially the Ripley role from Alien and we all remember Sigourney Weaver's last-reel strip to her frankly ridiculously tiny skimpies. (Hilariously, the given reason for everyone going down to their undies is that their legs won't fit in the massive pressure suits.) Sadly Underwater doesn't have the depth (sorry) or the complexity of Alien: it's a simple A-to-B trek while avoiding the numerous gribbley monsters and the one absolutely massive gribbley monster, which is allegedly something out of HP Lovecraft.

It looks nice (Bojan Bazelli's photography is terrific), except for the overly if justifiably murky exteriors, but what's really surprising is that there's nothing very surprising about it. It plays pretty much as you'd expect as you're watching it and it doesn't do anything out of its very limited comfort zone. It's also a little difficult to accept the seriousness of the blueprints flashing on screen under the opening credits when they don't even spell "buoyancy" correctly. Still, I have a soft spot for SF base movies, whether Martian or marine, and even when they're not doing anything that startling I'm happy enough when the familiar paces are walked through with reasonable efficiency. But sadly Underwater doesn't have very much more to offer than efficiency.

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