WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Underwater, in theaters now.
For the most part, Underwater hides its aquatic monsters, especially the foot-soldiers seen in the trailer hunting Kristen Stewart's Norah and her drilling team on the sea bed of the Mariana Trench. Just like DC's Trench, these monsters think they're being invaded and with humanity's intrusion, they decide to turn into predators and feed on the scientists.
And the way it's done, with the creatures seen in glimpses, pulling people into the dark oceanic abyss or swiftly swimming past them, it's clear the movie is paying homage to 1975's Jaws. However, as much as it's cool to pay tribute to the film that paved the way and broke ground for his particular sub-genre of horror, it's clear it's time for sea monster movies to move past emulating the legendary Steven Spielberg flick.
Jaws is famous for hiding its shark, giving us a degree of dread and tension, which modern horror has fully evolved into the jump-scare. In the '70s and '80s, you could tell this was a style many films wanted to carbon copy. Movies like 1977's Orca and 1978's Piranha, not to mention modern flicks like The Meg, have helped shape this style of suspense they so prominently followed. But there comes a point where it's over-saturation, something that Underwater suffers from. Director William Eubank overdoes it as the new sea monster movie never gets a chance to become its own thing.
Underwater flounders as it can't strike that balance between being a straight-up horror like Jaws or the sci-fi film the trailers promised. Simply put, by turning its creatures into the shark, Underwater takes away from its potential uniqueness. This is a chance to create fresh monsters and add something to the genre, but instead, Eubank apes Jaws to the point that it's legit a cat-and-mouse stalking game that swaps the giant fish out for cephalopods. And by the time the creatures are revealed, it's obvious there's another over-worn trope on the way: a bigger shark.
Jaws laid the template down for this and almost every sea creature movie followed this pattern to a tee. Underwater also walks this watery road in the finale with its Kaiju, the Kraken-like Godmother, and apart from its failed design and weak attitude, it's underwhelming as there's no level of surprise as to how the narrative would unfold. It's predictable, to say the least, based on how much Jaws is in this script. What's also very anticlimactic is Norah turns the Roebuck drill into a bomb from all the fuel it mined and detonates the core to kill the monster army. Of course, this rips off the conclusion of Jaws where Roy Schieder's Chief Hooper jams a pressurized scuba tank into the shark's mouth and shoots it, with the resulting explosion obliterating the shark.
Again, so many sea monster films use this finale to blow its threats up. Heck, it even happened in Pacific Rim. It's all because of Jaws and while we're grateful for the cinematic masterpiece Spielberg laid down, cinema needs to respectfully leave it behind. Underwater could have been the oceanic version of Predator that people were expecting, but it went down a tired path.
These movies need to evolve, yet they persist in repeating the mistake so many space movies are trapped in. What ends up happening is these movies feel redundant and lack creative identity, which tends to bore audiences. Jaws will forever remain an influential and timeless classic but to paraphrase Kylo Ren, kill the past and move on because it's the only way movies like Underwater can progress into franchises as opposed to one-off films that sink rather than float to success.
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.