On paper, Underwater looks like a decent movie. It’s only 95 minutes long, happening in an environment that’s foreign to a lot of people, which lends itself to having almost a free range of ideas, where you might even alter some “rules” as to what might happen under such a pressure, deep, underneath the ocean.

Well, this movie took a different path of… not doing anything interesting, shooting everything in total darkness and having the editor consume 16 cups of coffee a day, as that editing was… something else. Let’s break each of these points down, shall we…?

First of all, the story couldn’t be any simpler. Which it’s not an issue, plenty of great films have really simple premise. But what those movies have Underwater doesn’t have are characters! You can have the simplest of stories, if you give us something (or somebody) to root for! I challenge anyone who had seen this movie, name me 3 characters and tell me something about them… Exactly, I have seen this movie yesterday and literally can’t remember Kristen Stewart‘s character name and the only interesting (character) thing about her was she had a dog…? That’s another thing, before you even get a chance to meet some of these, boom, they are dead. And if they don’t happen to die, you still don’t know much about them to root for them.

The darkness element is definitely not just this movie, so I will (try) to go easy here, as it’s unfortunately, the trend of last 10 years or so. It’s almost like there was a meeting we, mere peasants, didn’t know about, where there was established that any newer horror/thriller movie NEEDS to be shot in the dark, so you can’t see anything. It’s incredible, how the times have changed. I have recently re-watched the original Halloween (1978, review coming soon) and realised that even though the main action is happening at night, I never got lost, didn’t have to squint my eyes, trying to distinguish shapes on my screen… and on the budget of $80 million dollars (WHAT?! How was this movie anywhere close to $20 million…?!) I would expect to actually see what’s happening on the screen. This movie doesn’t look like $80 million movie, I am so sorry, but how…? I can’t get over it. Just for a comparison, Arrival (2016) much better movie, in every way, shape, form, dimension, looks more like $80 million movie, but it “only” costed around $47 million!! I really hope Kristen got payed well.

The editing… Look, plenty of people are making fun of Marvel movies being chopped to bits, and yes, that would be their biggest flaw. But compared to Underwater, any Marvel movie looks like it was shot by zombie Sergio Leone as that’s literally day and night. I swear there were sequences literally every second had a cut. I usually don’t notice editing, unless it’s great, or really, really bad. And this unfortunately was the latter.

What makes me the angriest is I could still see a decent movie with the same exact cast, story (well, tweak it a bit, so it’s not exactly exact) if only somebody more capable was behind the camera. Somebody like Drew Goddard, or even better, Ridley Scott as the potential is here, the cast is solid, the setting lends itself to pretty much anything. The wasted potential is always the worst offender. What could have been…

I think that sums up Underwater – wasted cast, wasted potential, no characters, and don’t even get me started on the “aliens”, more precisely on how generic/non-threatening they looked. I there was a competition to design “the most average looking alien you can think of” and then they’ve used the person’s design, who ended up third, that’s how average they looked. And who/what are they? What motivates them? Are they aliens or are they creatures from the earth? Well, fuck you for asking questions like these, the film won’t tell you. I am having a hard time to recommend this movie to anybody, even if you are the most hardcore Kristen Stewart’s fan, this movie you might want to skip. And yes, I am still mad about the $80 million budget…

That’s all for this one! Did you see it? What did you think about it? Let me know!

Until next time,

Luke

Before jumping into this review, I do need to admit my possible bias – I’ve watched this film about 3/4 weeks after it dropped on Disney+ (that doesn’t seem that bad, but in today’s world, where you are supposed to watch everything the first minute it comes out and have a review ready the second minute it’s out, it almost feels forever ago). I haven’t read any reviews for the movie, but I’ve heard pretty much everybody and their grandma saying that this was a huge misfire on all cylinders. So I’ve braced myself for the worst and one Saturday afternoon, pushed the play button… what I’ve gotten was something so uniquely bad, I couldn’t believe and it brought me back almost two decades.

Why? Because at the beginning of 2000’s, I do remember these movie being really popular (even though I’ve never seen it), I remember similar movie called Agent Cody Banks (2003) existing and again, I’ve only watched the trailers for that movie, that to this day stayed with me for being so cheesy and bad, that while watching Artemis Fowl, I got a reminder that set me back almost 20 years ago. I can’t comment on quality of Agent Cody Banks (maybe it’s a hidden gem for all I know, even though the IMDb rating of 5.0/10 says a different story) but I can comment on this movie and… where should I start?

This movie feels like there were simply too many cooks in the kitchen, as you won’t convince me for a second, that Sir Kenneth Branagh directed this in the exact way he wanted. I’ve seen a few movies in my relatively short life to be able to tell when the studio interfered too much, and this is unfortunately the prime example of that. Which is something I’ll never understand – they (studio, in this case, Disney) buy the rights to really popular book series, and than they kind of ignore the story of each book and do a bit of the first one, a bit of the second one… this approach always puzzled me, as I don’t think this approach has ever worked (The Dark Tower (2017) has entered the chat). And I am not saying the need to adapt the books precisely in the way they are written, no, as even Harry Potter movies leave out bunch of details, but the main reason the movies worked as well as they have, is they respected the story elements! If something happens in the second/third book, there might be a reason to use it in those movies, not trying to mix it into the very first one, because it’s a cool idea. I have read the Harry Potter books before the movies were done and I am a fan of both.

And I am writing this as a person, who has never read a single Artemis Fowl book, but from what I’ve read after I’ve watched this movie from the fans who love it, that’s exactly what they have done here, they have taken certain parts of first 3 books and mixed them together. Unfortunately, it does feel like that.

This movie just feels like a childish wanna be adventure, where some parts of it are inspired by Harry Potter (ferries/magic exists) mixed with Men in Black series (where they need to keep it a secret, so they can manipulate time in order to erase our memories) sprinkle some big budget on top of it with Colin Farrell and Judi Dench and you have… a big mess of a movie, that’s all over the place tonally, story wise (plenty of times I wasn’t sure whether I’ve missed something, or movie relied on me knowing the books…?) and it just feels more cringey than the filmmakers intended.

What pains me the most is I 100% believe that the books are way, way better than this and if Artemis Fowl was done right, we could’ve had a new franchise on our hands. But this has flopped really hard, where the chances of this movie getting a sequel are slimmer than Kanye winning the 2020 presidential race (even though, with 2020 being the year of everything goes, I wouldn’t be surprised by anything anymore).

That’s all for this one! Did you see it? What did you think about it? Let me know!

Until next time,

Luke

Where to start with this one…

I really like the original Men in Black (1997), as it was surprisingly refreshing blockbuster – fun, charming, really good screenplay, and great chemistry between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, that was what made it the surprise hit of 1997 (see for yourself here). Mainly the monologue Tommy Lee has stuck with me ever since:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

Agent K on people.

So no wonder, 5 years later, the sequel was born, which is still watchable, but proved that bigger is not always better. But again, it was a decent movie, where at least you weren’t bored watching it.

10 years after that, Men in Black 3 came about and I’ve only seen it once, and remember feeling… alright. Almost as with the previous one, it was alright, but not really memorable in any way, shape or form. But also not boring, or unfunny.

And now (or, year 2019, to be exact) Men in Black: International found its way onto the theatre screens, with brand new (all sexy now!) cast, brand new settings and… and… yeah, that’s pretty much it.

This movie fails as a spin-off of this franchise, as there is almost nothing tying it back to the original trilogy, but what’s worse, this movie fails as a comedy. The only person, who’s actively trying to make us laugh is all CGI (yes, all hail Kumail Nanjiani) but guess what? Even he can’t save this movie, as he definitely has had better roles. And that’s what I don’t understand.

We know Chris Hemsworth can be surprisingly funny and engaging character on screen (his almost a cameo role in Vacation (2015) was definitely the highlight of that movie, and as much as it pains me to write this, he was the best part of the Ghostbusters (2016)… well maybe after Kate McKinnon, who tried to save that movie, but that’s a review for another day) the same goes for Tessa Thompson who we know as charismatic and capable actress that had pretty solid chemistry with Chris in Thor: Ragnarok (2017). So what went wrong? How come, suddenly, these two don’t work as well? That’s the main issue with this movie, what was supposed to be THE reason this film should have worked (duo that worked well in the past), turned out to be its biggest problem…

When your comedic duo doesn’t work, the movie around them can’t work, unfortunately it is as simple as that and I don’t know if it was the script, or the direction, or bit of both, but there was no chemistry for me here. And it’s not like they were particularly bad, but they didn’t work well together.

Another problem I had with this movie, but that’s mainly for almost every single major movie these days… everything looked fake. Especially in this movie, every location looked like they were shooting on a set, surrounded by green/blue walls. I understand there will always be CGI involved, as, you know, it’s a movie about space and aliens, but even the desert location looked fake to me. Maybe it was, in which case, I shouldn’t have noticed that. And if they were shooting in desert, how did you manage for it to look so fake…?

Beware, SPOILERS are coming!

One last reason this movie didn’t work for me was the way they had decided to “telegraph” who’s the main “surprise” villain of this movie basically ever since he steps on the screen. I don’t know who came up with that, as again, I know it’s kind of generic Hollywood thing nowadays, for villains to be obvious from the very beginning, mainly in comedies, but come on… why? Can’t the audience be trusted to figure it out on their own, or to have fun figuring it out anymore? You don’t even need to be a movie maniac like myself to know almost instantly Liam Neeson is the actual bad guy (duh).

That is why this movie doesn’t work for me overall – it’s a mix and match, generic Hollywood screenplay with some questionable CGI, sexy people taking over a franchise that was once popular, where studio throws everything on the wall, hoping something would stick. In this case, almost nothing does. I’d rather watch second and third MiB movies back to back several times, than watching this movie one more time.

That’ all for this one! Did you see it? What did you think about it? Let me know!

Until next time,

Luke