- Directed by William Eubank
- Written by Brian Duffield, Adam Cozad
- Stars Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Mamoudou Athie
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 35 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCFWEzIVILc
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
It’s “The Abyss,” only with more disasters. And monsters. It’s a fun, fast-paced movie with a lot of tension and claustrophobic moments. We liked it!
Synopsis
As credits roll, we see facts and news articles about the Marianas Trench and the deepest drill site ever. There is mention of strange figures, unexplained tremors, and other mysteries.
Norah brushes her teeth in the bathroom of the subsea base as the lights flicker. It must happen a lot because she doesn’t seem upset. There’s a small tremor, and she does notice that. She feels a drop of water come from the ceiling and then the base explodes. She runs, people panic, it’s all very frantic as she and Rodrigo watch a corridor flooding toward them. They close the airlock door just in time.
They have to find an escape pod. She’s a mechanical engineer, so she knows things about the station. They have to take their way to CR-7 where the evac pods are. They also find Paul, and the three of them have to crawl through a claustrophobic tunnel.
They get to the pod bay and find Captain Lucien there. He insists that they are all getting out alive. They go to the control room and find Liam and Emily there. They have about 30 minutes until the power cores have a meltdown. Also, there’s some scary sounds on the last recording from the mining site. Could something be down there?
They’re pretty much doomed unless they walk to the Roebuck, the deeper base that’s a mile below them. It’s insane, but it just might work. They all put on their super deep-sea suits. They go down into the pressure bay and Rodrigo implodes, shooting floating chunks of his body everywhere. They take the cargo elevator down to the lower sections.
A couple of the guys go outside to check a defective escape pod and they’re attacked by a thing that looks like the little version of a Xenomorph from “Alien.” They come back inside, but then they start hearing footsteps on the roof of the elevator. Something is out there.
The base above explodes, causing the elevator to fall. They have to run across the floor of the Marianas Trench as debris falls all around them. They see humanoid shapes out there. They enter the tunnel to the final station, and they lose Paul to one of the creatures; it rips him right out of his suit.
They have to go back outside to walk some more, and they run into another creature. After a lot of tension, they lose the Captain as well. Emily and Liam get left behind, but may not be dead.
Now Norah’s on her own. She arrives at Sheperd, an abandoned earlier base. There’s no escape pods, but there are tools and lots of good stuff. She arms herself and does a few repairs.
She goes back outside and finds Emily and Liam, but Liam’s unconscious. Finally, they reach the Roebuck, the drill site, which seems to be intact. Except it’s covered by tentacles. They walk through the tentacles until Emily’s suit sets off an alarm that wakes up the creatures. Norah is literally swallowed whole by one of them, but she shoots her way out.
Suddenly, all the creatures swim away. Norah lights a torch and sees a giant Cthulhu-sized sea monster. The three survivors all finally get inside the drilling installation and make their way to escape pods. The big thing outside is wrecking the base as they run from one destroyed section to another.
Liam and Emily get in the pods and launch, but Norah’s pod is defective, so she has to stay behind. She sees the creatures going after the pods, so she sets the base to self-destruct. She blows up everything within a huge radius, monsters, base, and herself included.
As credits roll, we see that the company denies everything and plans to resume drilling soon…
Commentary
It’s very fast moving, with disaster after disaster and death after death starting about two minutes in. It barely lets up.
It would have taken years to build that base; why are the creatures just now appearing? There’s living quarters all over the place; this was a busy place, it’s not like these folks were the first ones down there. The captain said Shepherd base was empty, but it had lots of tools equipment, and the captain even had a locker full of personal stuff in there. What’s up with that?
How did only the two escape pods make it to the surface when the captain said he launched more than twenty of them before Norah met up with him? What happened to them? Questions aside, this was an excellent film that the Horror Guys both recommend.