Deep Water Is the Movie We’ll All Be Watching on a Loop in Purgatory

There’s a movie theater at the end of the world that’s showing Deep Water. In the inexpressible in-between that awaits us all, in that half-dimension where we recognize it’s all over but haven’t quite made our peace with it yet, we’ll be watching Renny Harlin’s gloriously idiotic and entertaining new plane-crash-and-shark-attack picture on repeat, 24/7. It gives us everything it advertises: A giant passenger jet crashes in the middle of the sea, and the survivors are feasted on by the ocean’s fearsome predators. What’s more, it gives us those things in satisfying spades — the crash is agonizingly long and horrific, as if it’s been assembled from every nightmare you’ve had about planes; the shark attacks manage to be bloody, surprising, at times even visceral, which is quite an accomplishment since shark attacks at this point are probably as common as kisses in cinema.

Beyond those elements, Deep Water gives us nothing else, because to do so would be to admit that there is meaning to our world. The characterizations are transparent and the themes so plainly stated that they border on self-parody. “Sometimes in life, you gotta take a few detours to get where you’re going,” the plane’s somber first officer, Ben, played by Aaron Eckhart, randomly (and hilariously) says to a little girl in the airport before they take off and after she points out that, at his age, he really should be a captain pilot. The obligatory annoying passenger, Dan (Angus Sampson), isn’t just some exasperating slob — he is a narrative free radical who (1) harasses the stewardesses; (2) chain-smokes in places where he shouldn’t, all the while complaining about the fact that you can’t smoke anywhere; (3) cuts in front of others in the boarding line; (4) literally throws away the emergency GPS thingamabob that will identify their location to rescue teams after the crash; and (5) causes the crash in the first place by leaving his ratty charging cable connected to his dumb phone in his luggage, which then starts a fire. There is a moment right after the crash, as a quarter of the plane’s fuselage sits perched precariously atop a crumbling coral reef, with bodies strewn everywhere, when Dan casually settles himself into an airplane seat, grabs a bag of free peanuts, and quips about a wounded stewardess getting him a drink. It is entirely possible Dan made this movie.

Deep Water has plenty of characters as it goes through the disaster-movie motions of introducing everyone through brief, hastily written vignettes, and it tosses around a lot of artificially earnest elements that could, in more deft hands, become real, emotional through-lines. There’s Sam (Li Wenhan), a Chinese e-sports player who’s secretly in love with one of his teammates, Lilly (Zhao Simei). There’s Hutch (Lakota Johnson), a jerk from the competing American team who drunkenly bullies Sam in the airport but later — after their plane crashes and everyone (including the U.S. team’s coach) starts getting eaten by sharks — gives him romantic advice about letting Lilly know how he really feels. (By the way, I know they were e-sports players only because I pored through the end credits and saw that some other actors were credited as unnamed e-sports players; in the movie itself, all we know is that they’re a team and that they’re wearing matching tracksuits.) There’s a dorky guy (Rob Kipa-Williams) who sorta kinda likes Martine (Madeleine West), a single veterinarian sitting in the same row. There’s a recently married couple whose respective kids (Molly Belle Wright and Elijah Tamati) don’t get along. While the film, amazingly, attempts to resolve all these dilemmas, one can’t call what these characters go on journeys — or anything resembling development. They’re there because the film knows they have to be; the script (by five credited writers and presumably by even more uncredited ones) almost dares us to assemble the emotional trajectories ourselves.

Harlin was once one of the signature genre auteurs of the ’90s, his films perched somewhere between schlock and grade-A action. (For every Cliffhanger or Long Kiss Goodnight, there was a Mindhunters or a Driven or a Die Hard 2, and somewhere in the middle lay Deep Blue Sea, which is grade-A schlock.) While he’s far from the status he achieved back then, he has continued to work regularly, having made the last three Strangers films, none of which I think I’ve seen. Deep Water, which of course recalls Deep Blue Sea in its fusing of disaster flick and shark thriller, represents both a flex and a eulogy in the twilight wasteland of contemporary cinema: The director still knows how to land a guffaw-inducing thrill, the kind of jump scare that delights with both its effectiveness and its stupidity. And the film is better shot than most modern disaster pictures with its underwater and night shots that are lit properly and evocatively. But the picture also seems to acknowledge that one can’t go back home again (despite all the dialogue about literally going back home). The busy but lazy writing, the indifferent but insistent performances, the cheap but plentiful effects all remind us that we no longer make these types of movies with anything resembling conviction or artistry; we simply don’t know how to anymore. But you might ask, Who needs such things when you’ve got a plane crash and sharks? To which Deep Water says, Exactly. Few recent movies better embody the vibe that in a spiritual vacuum all that matters is momentary sensation, a dry quickening of the pulse to counteract the emptiness of what we might still choose to call “existence.”