I was looking forward to this one and I was only let down a bit. I will say I'm a big fan of Leviathan so this sort of movie is for me. And I usually check out Kirsten Stewart movies. I didn't watch the trailer and only saw the first poster. So the setup and events were a surprise.
My thoughts will spoil a lot of the movie so.
SPOILERS!!!
SPOILERS FINAL WARNING!!!
SPOILER TEXT HIGHLIGHT TO READ
At the start of the movie I was reminded of great movies movies like Alien and Aliens. I still haven't seen The Abyss yet! And of course Leviathan. To the point where something that's joked about in the first part of Leviathan happens in Underwater.
Underwater starts fast and barely lets up. We only get a bit of dialog and it gets going with a disaster at the station. That bit of dialog is important though to Kristen Stewart's character Norah. And it's also my biggest problem with the movie. Something happened to Norah's character. I don't think we clearly find out. The dialog in parts of the movie were difficult for me to understand. But I think Norah lost her boyfriend or husband to a tragedy. In fact, we see Norah touch an unseen for the most part necklace under her shirt many times in the movie. And she has a picture of him near her workstation that she takes with her before her journey.
Anyway, Norah and her group need to go to and walk across the ocean floor to another station to get to some escape pods or just safety. And at the end, after surviving all this underwater stuff, Norah decides to give up and sacrifice herself to save this couple in the group. It's kind of a mushy relationship thing. I didn't buy it because Norah goes through so much to survive. She's the hero. The person who she states at the beginning is a glass half empty person, that now fights to live throughout the movie. We even see her fixing many machines to survive. Maybe if she wasn't fixing things and there wasn't an escape pod, I could kind of see it. Or if we saw what the bad guy was doing first. But no, she just gives up and doesn't try anything. Doesn't even use the computers to search for other pods. I don't think they addressed if the escape pods could only support one person. Unlike in Alien when they stated how many the escape ship could take. This isn't Ripley at the end of Aliens on the planet or Jyn Erso at the end of Rogue One both with zero options. A bunch of recent modern movies have these give up deaths at the end and I hate it.
However, the good thing is there is an alternate ending in which Norah survives! And guess what? That is where we see Norah's necklace and it ends up helping her. You can even see the pod she fixes flashing both red and green in the normal version of the movie. But Kristen Stewart wanted that bad ending.
https://www.nylon.com/kristen-stewart-underwater-ending
Honestly, I think this alternate ending should have been a studio override situation. Someone should have known the type of movie they were making. Or the type of movie they had.
Also I have to mention the bad guy. It's Cthulhu! I can't believe the studio didn't use that to market Underwater. Teasing ancient evil or something. At least have an after release poster spoiling the villain. It's like having a Alien poster without the Alien or egg. Underwater turned out to be a flop according to wiki. But more people should check this out. It's a short movie and almost all action.
Another slight problem is since it's supposed to be underwater, the picture is kind of dark. And I couldn't tell what was going on at times or where the group was going. Since the group and company has high tech equipment, the director could have shown maps on their helmets or screens at the other locations to give reference to where they were. But that's one of those things that you appreciate with movies like Alien and Aliens. Even though dark in those movies, you can see the well designed locations.
Without the spoiler, I liked the movie. I actually had a few jump scares which is rare for me. It could have been better. But after listening to some bits from the director, he wasn't locked down on certain elements until after filming. That's something I'll never understand with Hollywood. But it's worth a watch if not owning if you like movies like Leviathan or those movies I put in the spoiler.