What Lurks Beneath

Another case of a potentially decent cast, at least some of them, in search of a script.

I usually do a quick flip thru before I watch the movie to see what is in store and was kinda impressed. One or two stages were OK for a budget film, almost good. As to rest, let's just say it is likely that the director and crew never bothered to visit any of the over 200 submarines on display, nor watched any of the many good submarine movies out there.

Don't expect much from the acting. Not sure many of them even watched a good navy film to get into character. A few exceptions maybe.

But worst of all is the script. The specific events that make, or more often break, the movie are completely unbelievable. Good Sci-fi movies can make you believe in anything because they make sure the setup and the expected basics (the hows, the cast reactions, etc) are believable. Not this movie. You barely start down the path of believing something and then it falls apart quite quickly.

The only reason to watch this is to see how to take a possible 3 to 4 star movie, and make it a 1 or 2. (I gave 2 only because I saw something in a few cast members.)

The sub in this film or whatever was used looks really old, probably last used in the 1990s. There's white paneling with wood trim. The controls look 1970s era and there are some 1990s era small televisions.

So they could have set this film in an earlier era. Some other things still aren't quite right though. The captain looks like he's only 30 and has sleeve tattoos. One of the crewmembers is severely overweight, like what the heck is he doing on the sub?

Outside of that, the film is an interesting storyline but could have been presented better. The central character, the mysterious woman, is just not that interesting to watch.

Relative novice director Jamie Baily and first time writer Marcus Raul have attempted a serious and poignant horror thriller that becomes one of the most torturous movies to rate because it has an apparent number of inscrutable rational flaws of logic and military behavior involving a nuclear submarine, its members, a well performed female stranger, and possible World War III (reminiscent of the television series Outer Limits, 1995-2002) devastation along with an extremely difficult job of including a number of subplots that get awkwardly entangled into the movie. From the beginning, writer Rual has a difficult time incorporating important plot points that seem to control the script in ways are arbitrarily inserted in places that don't feel natural. The attempt to tie the climax with a fragile relational dilemma, behind the scenes secrets between the American Naval members and the British Intel operators seem unnecessarily uneven. Nevertheless the sincerity of the attempt at a pure consistent narrative structure throughout the movie along with the dramatic and emotional ending holds itself up well. This movie is worth one viewing for its depth of substance incorporating a series of neat Naval command protocols usually overlooked in average military movies, the number of authentic feeling human doubts, and the strength of the main plot that make this movie barely survive its higher rating.

The Plot:

The crew of USS Titan find themselves on the brink of WWIII with Russia when a naked stowaway appears in one of their torpedo tubes. Captain Banks fears she may be Russian, but she's something far more dangerous.

Yeah, this movie. Hands down, this is perhaps the worst movie i have screened so far all year. The acting is dismal but maybe I could have gotten over that if the script was any good.

It's not. It's just horrible. The dialog is inauthentic at best and the delivery is wooden.

The storyline is really silly and you know this film is going to be bad right from the titles which show a cartoon (yep, not even CGI) mermaid swimming.

The direction is slow. Real slow. Sleep inducing slow. It's truly a bad movie. Don't waste your time.

The movie ended up being frustrating because the potential was there. The acting was serviceable to decent, especially given the script they had to work with. They tried to blend a war film with horror elements, and really squandered the horror potential. They did not use the claustrophobic setting effectively at all, and didn't focus on the "woman" and her abilities nearly enough. The writers didn't seem to know of a way to keep the woman in the sub without making the characters, who otherwise seemed competent, repeatedly notice and then immediately begin to ignore all of the strange happenings that began immediately after finding her in the torpedo tube, which should have been the first clue that she had to be dealt with. A better written and directed version of this movie could have been described as a cross between Alien and Dr. Strangelove, but this ultimately just ended up being another waste of potential, which is a shame for the fairly unknown cast. 5 stars because the concept had enough potential to get me to the end of the film without really wanting to turn it off.