I continued the underwater theme today with Leviathan (1989). Another of the 1989 underwater thrillers, this film follows almost exactly the same beats as DeepStar Six, but I feel that it has both higher highs and lower lows than that one.
Our team of underwater roughnecks this time are miners extracting silver from the sea bed. I have no idea if this is an economically viable setup, or even if there is silver at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, but it could not matter less, because it never comes up in relation to the plot.
Peter Weller plays Beck, a geologist tasked with leading the mining team. He is completely monotone the entire film, and I can't decide if he hated making this movie, or if he's just like that. The only non-RoboCop role I have seen him in prior to this was Buckaroo Banzai, where I also noticed that he had a particularly flat aspect compared to the rest of the cast. Was Weller typecast as the stone-faced straight-man, or is this just how he performs every role? If so, I can see why he was picked for RoboCop in the first place. It's not a bad performance exactly, it's just that his emotional reactions (or lack thereof) are jarringly at odds with the scenes happening around him. If he was going for cool and unflappable, it kind of works, but Beck's character arc in this film is about gaining the confidence to stand up to his corporate overlords, so having him be cool as ice from the start is at odds with the text of the film. I'm probably overthinking this, because I want to like Peter Weller, but so far the first RoboCop is the only movie where he seemed to understand the assignment (Although to be fair, he's barely in RoboCop 2 at all).
Richard Crenna (Trautman from First Blood!) plays a world weary and cynically detached Doctor Thompson, in probably the standout performance of the picture (other than Jones). Daniel Stern (One half of the Wet Bandits from the Home Alone movies) plays Six Pack, the requisite drunken sex pest member of the crew. Williams (Amanda Pays) is a posh and proper Brit, who fills the role of Beck's love interest. Cobb (Hector Elizondo) and Jones (Ernie Hudson, Winston from Ghostbusters!) are miners and good union men. Bowman (Lisa Eilbacher) plays the apparently also requisite role of 'girl who likes the drunken sex pest character'. DeJesus (Michael Carmine) is the final member of the team, and I thought he was going to basically be analogous to Miguel Ferrer's character in DeepStar Six, but that ended up being Doc Thompson. Cult movie regular Meg Foster plays Ms. Martin, the human face of Tri-Oceanic, the corporation which owns the mining platform, and who repeatedly delivers the news that the team is not going to be rescued.
The creature in this movie is both far creepier and better looking than the crustacean in DeepStar, and the plot nonsense around its creation is a lot of fun. Basically, the russkies were playing around with genetic engineering, trying to make a fishman, and made something much worse instead. This picture heavily borrows from The Thing, in addition to the standard Alien stuff, and the body horror is done pretty effectively. I noticed that this movie had almost triple the budget of DeepStar, but it really doesn't look like it apart from those effects. The diving suit sequences are great, but there is almost no actual underwater footage in this one, and much fewer miniatures. It doesn't look worse than DeepStar, but apart from the creature, it doesn't look better either. They just failed to make back their budget, so it seems like the audiences felt the same way at the time (DeepStar Six made almost their whole budget back, but certainly was not a success either).
The chemistry between the characters is somewhat lacking, and while there are some funny lines, there doesn't seem to be the kind of easy camaraderie among the crew that is so important for establishing audience buy-in in this kind of movie. They just don't seem like people who have been working together for 87 days at the start of the film. That said, Hudson's Jones is a welcome ray of sunshine in a number of scenes (even if he's complaining in most of them) and his comedic chops do a lot to carry the movie. That's probably why he was one of the longest surviving crew-members, somewhat contrary to the stereotype (Although ultimately giving in to it in a frankly disappointing display. I wanted Jones to live, and his death was not cool enough to be better than letting him survive in terms of audience satisfaction. The movie was already basically over. That was probably the lowest point in the film, which sucks because it was during the climax. This parenthetical has gone on way too long now.) and why he was the only crew member really shown to have a relationship with more than one of the others.
One of my favorite lines actually was delivered by Weller. He threatens Six Pack at one point, telling him "I'll pop your top. All six of em". At least, I assume that was a threat, it kind of reads a little bit like homoerotic innuendo. The true comedic standout, Jones, responds to the news that Six Pack has some kind of skin condition with "The only 'skin problem' I see is white people," to the white doctor, which is pretty hilarious. Upon the revelation that the creature has eaten the blood supply in the infirmary, he shouts "we got a goddamn Dracula in here with us?" and I will never not find it funny when people refer to all vampires (or blood-sucking lamprey creatures) as Draculas.
While DeepStar focused mostly on stealing the suspenseful elements of Alien, Leviathan opted to lift more of the grungy industrial vibe, and the flamethrower specifically. We only get to see them used briefly, but for much of the film members of the crew are carting around a set of flamethrowers that would not look out of place in Warhammer 40K, as well as some other formidable looking chainsaws and pole-axes.
The action is fairly well paced, although as mentioned, the emotional responses by the characters to what is happening to them are bizarrely muted, again with the exception of Jones. I'm fairly sure that the ending was actually at least two different endings that were cut together, because we see the creature pretty definitively die on-screen, and then it returns to kill Jones. The post-rescue scene has a comedic tone to it that is completely at odds with the entire rest of the movie, culminating in a slapstick gag where Peter Weller punches a woman in the face (with a comic sound effect) and then makes a quip about it. I am convinced they added that bit after realizing that Beck's character arc didn't have a resolution without a confrontation with his boss, because his core flaw had been established as a reluctance to stand up to her, and he doesn't do that in a meaningful way prior to escaping the mining platform.
Overall I enjoyed this one maybe a little more than DeepStar Six. The plot is more ambitious, and the creature far more effective. That's why I feel weird about this, but I'm also going to give it a 3.5/5. I think watching this movie did more to make me cognizant of DeepStar's structural flaws, many of which it shares with this movie, than it did to leave a distinct impression. DeepStar probably should have been a 3, or even a 2.5, and this one only squeaks over to a 3.5 because the creature is so much better, and Ernie Hudson put in some real work here.