Underwater Parent Guide

In the depths of Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, Tian Industries has built a massive mining complex to extract resources from the earth. Unfortunately for the crew, things have started to go wrong, beginning with a massive earthquake that destroys nearly 70% of the station. Worse yet, the damage threatens to send the nuclear reactor which powers the facility into a meltdown. A mechanical engineer, Norah Price (Kristen Stewart), must team up with the other survivors, including Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel) and Emily Haversham (Jessica Henwick), a biologist, in order to escape the crippled complex. But out in the deep dark water, something is moving…

Underwater is astoundingly unoriginal, but oddly watchable nonetheless. The script is lazy, burdened with dialogue that doesn’t sound like anything real people would say. It’s painful to listen to, with the surprising exception of T.J. Miller’s obvious ad libs. (This is a surprise because I usually find his style incredibly annoying). Maybe it works this time because the rest of the dialogue is so bland that Miller reigns in his usual weirdness to blend in a little better. Not that he reigns it in too far - his character, Paul, still spends the movie carrying and talking to a small stuffed rabbit.

As far as parental concerns go, Underwater is a pretty standard PG-13 action/horror. It stands out for a lack of awkward sexual innuendo or dialogue but overcompensates in the language and violence categories. With three extreme profanities and around eighteen scatological curses, the movie is getting away with a lot at the PG-13 level. The violence is more of what you’d expect, but it still isn’t wholesome family fun to watch a man’s pressure suit break and see what happens when the human body is suddenly exposed to 8 tons of pressure per square inch. I guess you could frame it as a science lesson? Maybe not.

Underwater is so stereotypical it almost feels like it belongs in another movie. You know how when a character watches a movie, it always feels like a joke about genre films? This is that. If an original thought went into the movie, I clean missed it. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. Movies like this set your brain firmly in the off position, rendering any complex thinking impossible for the following half hour at minimum. As such, it’s a perfect choice for teenagers looking for a quick scare. It’s not like they were doing any complex thinking on the way in, either. And adult horror fans who are tired after a long week and want a simple scare with no profound philosophical questions can put their brains on park and drift along with the story.