Something to watch tonight: Monday 5 February

Underwater (Eubank, 2020)

Looking back on the edi­tion of At the Movies that I made at the end of January 2020, I see there are two films star­ring Kristen Stewart. One of them was Seberg, more of a pas­sion pro­ject for her but the less suc­cess­ful of the two films. Then there is a dif­fer­ent kettle of fish altogether …

Underwater is an unabashed homage to Alien – I don’t think any­one would com­plain about that descrip­tion – set on an under­sea drilling rig at the bot­tom of the Mariana Trench, the deep­est body of water in the world. If you want a slightly more sci­entif­ic por­trait of the area you could do worse than find the James Cameron doc­u­ment­ary, Deepsea Challenge 3D, where he piloted a sub­mers­ible of his own design down 10,000 metres to the sea floor.

In this new film, we are invited to believe that a min­ing con­glom­er­ate has dis­covered a rich vein of pre­cious metals and decided to build a gigant­ic con­struc­tion across sev­er­al miles of the least hos­pit­able ter­rit­ory known to man.

And, it’s about to get even less hospitable.

…

Barely fif­teen minutes into this pretty grip­ping film – which plays like a plucky little B‑movie but has prob­ably had about a squil­lion dol­lars spent on it – and we are all up to our necks in trouble. No, worse than that – we are in over our head.

…

Of course, it turns out that the dam­age wasn’t an earth­quake at all but the ugli­est mon­sters you’ve ever seen, unleashed from the depths of hell. Then it becomes even more Alien-like, as our female char­ac­ters start run­ning around some aban­doned liv­ing quar­ters in their under­wear as these fi-ends out­side get closer and closer.

The third pic­ture in that show was Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Not a bad week.

You can listen to the whole thing here.

Where to watch Underwater

Aotearoa, Australia & UK: Streaming on Disney+ (4K if your gear sup­ports it)

USA: Streaming on Hulu

Further listening

My week slot on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan every Friday has been refreshed and is now almost half an hour from 9.30pm. Every week I also spe­cific­ally high­light some­thing that can be watched for free.

Last Friday night, we spoke about Priscilla, Society of the Snow and the Mads Mikkelsen ‘sur­viv­al on the ice’ film Arctic which is stream­ing on Māori+.

Editor’s note

Tuesday 6 February is the Waitangi Day pub­lic hol­i­day in New Zealand so this news­let­ter will be tak­ing a day off.