All Fins, No Bite
There is nothing to like about Open Water, a 79-minute accident, except its brevity and that the filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau put themselves at risk in production. But even if real fins and fangs are enough to float your boat, stay home and watch the Discovery Channel.
Two busy Americans, Susan and Daniel, take a vacation to an unidentified tropical locale. They take a SCUBA outing. They get left behind in the open ocean. That's it.
There is nothing suspenseful about the set-up. Two poor people simply get stranded because the dive master spaces on the math. Yet we must endure a tedious exposition on his tally marks, a process that unfolds with the self-conscious deliberation of a chess game.
From there, nature takes over. Over and over. Open Water is a one-terror wonder—the flipping fins of real sharks, or the "what's lurking beneath" trick to low-budget horror. Except for a few clever shots, this technique is drastically overused. The "lurking" never pays off. One becomes numb to it. Just eat them, for crying out loud. (Apparently, these were also especially deliberate fish.) Beset by the circumstances, the two divers do nothing but jabber at each other and scream unconvincingly for the remainder of the picture. In fact, it was a shock to learn from the press notes that there was a script; Open Water sounds very much like an improvisation.
The acting is amateurish. At best, the characters' emotional meltdowns look more like anger exercises in marriage therapy than reactions to the circumstances (e.g., imminent death). Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis are trying, and they are not succeeding. Maybe they were waterlogged.
The direction follows a film school laziness (masked as style) that is hard to take. What is the emotional value of a close-up of a door handle? There is no cogent visual style, no sense of storytelling and no meaningful order to the editing.
Finally, to quote the press notes, Open Water endeavors to remind us "of the fragility and vulnerability of modern man in relation to the vast and indiscriminate power of nature." "We blunder off into an exotic locale, cement over the place and serve each other drinks," opines filmmaker Kentis. "We go with arrogance into these places, forgetting we're also animals in the food chain." This is the theme, and yet Kentis and Lau rhapsodize about taming nature—"real sharks!"—for the purposes of this movie. Lau says, "I never felt for a moment that anyone was in danger." Apparently nature isn't all that powerful? Or are indie directors exempt from the laws of the food chain?
Two busy Americans, Susan and Daniel, take a vacation to an unidentified tropical locale. They take a SCUBA outing. They get left behind in the open ocean. That's it.
There is nothing suspenseful about the set-up. Two poor people simply get stranded because the dive master spaces on the math. Yet we must endure a tedious exposition on his tally marks, a process that unfolds with the self-conscious deliberation of a chess game.
From there, nature takes over. Over and over. Open Water is a one-terror wonder—the flipping fins of real sharks, or the "what's lurking beneath" trick to low-budget horror. Except for a few clever shots, this technique is drastically overused. The "lurking" never pays off. One becomes numb to it. Just eat them, for crying out loud. (Apparently, these were also especially deliberate fish.) Beset by the circumstances, the two divers do nothing but jabber at each other and scream unconvincingly for the remainder of the picture. In fact, it was a shock to learn from the press notes that there was a script; Open Water sounds very much like an improvisation.
The acting is amateurish. At best, the characters' emotional meltdowns look more like anger exercises in marriage therapy than reactions to the circumstances (e.g., imminent death). Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis are trying, and they are not succeeding. Maybe they were waterlogged.
The direction follows a film school laziness (masked as style) that is hard to take. What is the emotional value of a close-up of a door handle? There is no cogent visual style, no sense of storytelling and no meaningful order to the editing.
Finally, to quote the press notes, Open Water endeavors to remind us "of the fragility and vulnerability of modern man in relation to the vast and indiscriminate power of nature." "We blunder off into an exotic locale, cement over the place and serve each other drinks," opines filmmaker Kentis. "We go with arrogance into these places, forgetting we're also animals in the food chain." This is the theme, and yet Kentis and Lau rhapsodize about taming nature—"real sharks!"—for the purposes of this movie. Lau says, "I never felt for a moment that anyone was in danger." Apparently nature isn't all that powerful? Or are indie directors exempt from the laws of the food chain?
