A horror movie set on an oil rig. Okay, really it's ALIEN set on an oil rig. Except without all the good stuff...
The story: while trying to prepare an oil rig to face a coming hurricane, the crew is attacked by a strange underwater creature.
Was it good?
No.
And by "strange underwater creature" I mean a guy in a cheap Creature from the Black Lagoon outfit.
The idea itself is okay. An oil rig could be a cool, creepy location. But the first problem is the complete lack of cool, creepy atmosphere. The second is the monster, which is never really explained and never really shown and what we do see is pretty lame. I get the idea that what you don't see is more scary, but you need to see something. You need that one good shot of the monster, you need that one good explanation of what/why this is going on. In other words, you need some context.
See, it's all about questions and answers. The basic form of any story is to ask questions (or more precisely to get the audience to ask questions) and then to answer them. So in a movie like PIRAHNA, they ask "Who will they get next? How will they stop them?" And the movie then spends the next hour answering those questions. If the audience doesn't know what the monster is then they will ask "What is it? Why is it doing this?" and you then have to explain that, like in THE GRUDGE where SMG spends the movie trying to learn about the curse and how to lift it. But if you don't give the audience anything they just sit there wondering "What the hell is going on?" And that is a very bad question. That means that instead of being engaged with the story, they are distancing themselves from it. It's a question people ask when they are beginning to not care. And that is a very bad thing for a movie. Now some movies can make it work. CLOVERFIELD, for instance never answers any questions about the monster, but it does it by focusing even more on the characters -- setting up the story of these two people who love each other but are apart and the guy is leaving and getting us to ask "Will they be together? Will be tell her he loves her?"
Here there's just nothing. I just you could be asking if they will stop the thing that we don't know anything about, but it's tough to get too invested in something like that. And there's nothing going on with the people that's especially interesting. And we never learn anything about the creature so there's no real exploring of that mystery either.
Again, it doesn't matter what questions the audience is asking as long as you get them asking them and then answer them in compelling ways.
Which this movie fundamentally doesn't do in a massive, massive fail.
**** AVOID ****
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