Despite the leaps in technology during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, mankind has only explored five percent of the world's oceans and with those oceans making up seventy-one percent of the surface of our world, this means that approximately two-thirds of our own planet remains unexplored. Of the five percent of the oceans we have explored we have discovered living fossils such as the Coelacanth, sea monsters such as the giant squid Architeuthis, and the truly alien environments of hydrothermal vents. Therefore, of the remaining ninety-five percent of our world's oceans, there is virtually no way to predict what we could uncover.
However, screenwriters Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad together with director William Eubank would have us believe that whatever may be down there deep in the depths of the oceans, might not be too friendly.
While on the surface Underwater looks like The Abyss meets Alien, with echoes of Leviathan and Sphere, beneath the surface Underwater uses the tried and tested formula that made Alien, The Thing, Event Horizon and Predator (among others) so effective - a small group in an inescapable environment being eliminated one-by-one by an unfamiliar antagonist.
Starring Kristen Stewart (Twilight Saga) with a pixie hairdo, Vincent Cassell (Oceans Twelve) and T.J. Miller (Deadpool), Underwater also features another actor that should be familiar to science fiction horror fans - Gunner Wright, whose likeness and voice was used for Isaac Clarke in Visceral Games' seminal Dead Space series of video games.
Production for Underwater finished in May 2017 but the movie's release was delayed pending the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, with the movie now set for release January 10th, 2020.
