WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Underwater, in theaters now.
While the trailers for Underwater suggested humans on the ocean floor in the Mariana Trench would be attacked by a series of cephalopod-like creatures, as the film progresses it becomes clear they're part of a hive mind that's controlled by a much bigger creature.
The finale reveals this giant Kaiju to be the Kraken-like Godmother. With tentacles that run for miles, this beast has her 'babies' cling to her massive body and hibernate when they're not feeding on humans at the aquatic Kepler drilling station, of course. But when the Godmother emerges from the dark depths of the sea bed in the final act, rather than inspiring fear, she just meanders around until the film ends.
The Godmother should invoke a sense of horror that we've seen from the monsters in the Cloverfield and Pacific Rim franchises. But the visual aesthetic of the creature is amateur, with it looking like the Kraken from the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Seriously, the Godmother should have felt alien but it didn't have that sense of awe to it.
The Godmother feels like something you'd find in '90s movies like Deep Rising but actually leans closer to something like Parallax from Ryan Reynolds' Green Lantern movie. The creature falls even flatter when you realize it never truly displays its might or wreak true havoc. When it arrives on the scene, Norah (Kristen Stewart) has gotten her crew members to the Roebuck drill where they're speeding to the surface via escape pods. But the Kaiju just watches them shoot out, doing nothing for quite some time. That is until for plot convenience and drama's sake, she sends her spawn after the pods.
Fans want to see the monster tear the Roebuck apart but she just admires it and slowly trudges on. That's not how Kaiju should be operate in movies that they're the focal point. The Godmother should be doing anything and everything to get to Norah and her crew but by the time she tries to destroy the station, viewers are left wondering why she didn't go after the pods herself or use her tentacles to smash them to pieces. The beast feels lazy and is a step back from the modern Kaiju Hollywood has provided us with in recent years.
The failure of this wannabe-Kraken is cemented in the climax. When Norah turns the station into a bomb and blows the Kaiju up, the Godmother tries her best to run away. It's anticlimactic and compounds how weak of a foe she was. Seeing the monster stare death in the face would have brought some extra excitement to a dull finale, but the movie went in a more lackluster direction.
It's a shame that the creature was built up as a ravenous titan only for her come up short. All the promise from earlier in the film sinks and ultimately, the Godmother's a flop. She didn't look or act as vicious as viewers envisioned an undiscovered monster whose territory was invaded by mankind would. It's obvious the ends of the movie that the team behind it didn't really know how to shape a proper villain of epic proportions.
Directed by William Eubank (The Signal), Underwater stars Kristen Stewart, TJ Miller, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr. and Mamoudou Athie. The film is currently in theaters.