Just Eat Them Already

Movie Review:
Open Water

R / 1 hr., 19 min. / 2004

Despite the number of films out there that are “based on a true story,” real life does not lend itself well to movies. The daily existence of most people is quite ordinary, which, of course, is why screenwriters exist: They hunt down those intriguing little nuggets of real life that do hold some interest and then punch them up a bit with colorful characters, spicy dialogue, a well-rounded three-act structure, and so forth.

Open Water is based on one of those intriguing little nuggets of real life. The film’s story is simple and sounds much like the news copy of the event: A couple (Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan) take a vacation to a seaside town where they sign up for a scuba diving pleasure cruise. While they are enjoying close-up views of reefs and exotic fish, the boat captain makes a fatal calculation in counting the number of people who have come back to the boat. Believing that all passengers are back aboard, the captain returns to shore, and the couple re-surface to see nothing but ocean on all sides.

With no hope of swimming the vast leagues to shore, or of catching the attention of any of the ships on the distant horizon, the couple float along together as the current takes them into unknown territory. As the hours pass, they talk, they distract themselves with little word games, they unleash pent-up fury over their situation, they argue over who got them into this mess, they cry, they reconcile. And they notice the sharks.

Innocent bystanders trapped in dangerous and seemingly inescapable places can result in very suspenseful films. I think of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, or the recent sci-fi indie film Cube. The foundational premise for Open Water is equally fascinating, made more gripping by the fact that it is drawn from actual headlines. Here we have the sheer terror of a vast ocean separating us from safety, with unseen dangers surrounding us and circling closer with every passing hour.

But there is a foundational problem that frustrates any attempts at Open Water becoming a great movie: The creators tried too hard to create Real Life. They opted to discard Hollywood’s polished dialogue, experienced performers, professional lighting and imaging, or emotional orchestral score; and what they produced is Exhibit A in why Hollywood’s techniques produce better movies. Everyone who complains about the tepid products the Hollywood Machine puts out should see Open Water to learn how boring the alternative is. (Of course, there is the third option – well-made indie films – but these are basically just Hollywood-quality production values with fresher ideas in the foundation.)

In looking at Chris Kentis’ script, there is very little to work with. We really only have one central crisis – a couple isolated in shark-infested waters – and one crisis does not fill out a film very well. There are minor crises along the way, such as the encounter with jellyfish, but these elements are spurious. Take Finding Nemo, where Marlin’s and Dory’s swim through a sea of jellyfish has ramifications in the story: Marlin takes another step toward real courage, he demonstrates that he cares about Dory despite being frustrated by her, and he earns the respect and aid of the sea turtles. In Open Water, once the jellyfish have moved on, so has any concern or consequence regarding them; they have absolutely no lingering effect on the characters or the situation. And this is the recurring trend throughout the entire film.

Certainly an attempt is made to have the crisis push the couple over a character arc. They start as a fairly well-adjusted duo who are rather confused at finding no boat on the water’s surface. They wonder if maybe they swam too far afield during the dive. As reality sinks in, they get nervous. As time passes and they are able to really absorb their situation, the husband starts relieving stress by shouting to the gods, which irritates the wife, which sparks a heated argument about why they were scuba diving at all instead of being off on a different holiday, which they would have been if “you weren’t always so busy at work,” and so on. But it is a weak effort that failed to captivate or engage me, either because it stuck too closely to its predictable template or because it just sounded too mundane, I can’t decide. The dialogue comes across like an obligatory plot device rather than the natural inspired conversation of two desperate people. Who knows what a great writer could have done with this same scenario. I’d love to hear the couple’s conversation as per David Mamet, for example.

There is an utter extraneousness to the entire script, in fact. The film opens with the husband and wife packing for the trip. In a professional screenplay, this scene would contain either dialogue or visuals that would serve a function: Perhaps foreshadowing something to come, or providing important insight into the personalities of the couple. Alas, no, the scene says little more than “Here is the man, here is the woman.” Okay, there is a hint that they are both a little bit modernized, dependent on their laptops; but like the jellyfish, this facet of their characters has no part to play later on.

The packing scene is supposed to be clever – the husband is in the car, the wife is in a house somewhere, they’re on cell phones talking to each other, and it turns out they’re a mere thirty feet apart – but plays so much like ordinary life that it is blandly uninteresting. And even claiming it plays like real life is a stretch, as all of the scenes before they hit the water are so poorly acted they feel like some of my early home video productions.

The same uselessness is true for the scenes at the beach hotel where they spend the night before diving, unless you happen to enjoy explicit nudity. They talk like an ordinary couple, they have some romance and she announces she just doesn’t feel like “doing it” tonight, they go to sleep, they get up in the morning. The truth is, we could have gone straight to the couple arriving on the dock, run the opening credits over their getting on the boat, and not be missing any critical information at all.

I don’t know the circumstances under which the real couple in the true story got abandoned at sea, but the method used in this film seems sloppy. I cannot believe that a professional scuba diving tour boat company would be so careless in keeping track of the identities of the passengers, especially in our hyper-litigious society where a mistake like that would have lawyers swarming over the managers faster than Democrats flocking to Ohio to demand a recount.

Once the couple hits the water, the acting kicks in a bit, and there is a certain believability to Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan, minus the dialogue’s drawbacks and the plot’s one-note crisis. I wouldn’t be surprised if either one of these performers shows up in another production. After all, if Hollywood is willing to keep hiring Keanu Reeves, then Travis and Ryan are shoe-ins.

For me, as a videographer, the worst part about the film is the image itself. It is painfully obvious that the production was shot on a video camera. A good video camera, yes, but still a video camera. There is a distinct blur that is only achieved by shooting at 30 frames per second on video and transferring to film at 24 frames per second. This is bad enough to view in theaters, but when the 24 FPS image is sent back to DVD at 30 FPS with a 3/2 pull-down, there is no hope left for any kind of quality image. (Even if those technical terms meant nothing to you, you can see the difference by watching any movie shot on film and sent to video, and compare the look with Open Water.) At least projects like Time Code and The Blair Witch Project had the courtesy to send their original video edits straight to video instead of using the film print as an intermediate.

On top of this, many shots in the film look as though the cinematographer had the video camera’s aperture set to Automatic. You know Uncle Joe’s home videos, where he walks out of the house, and as he does so, the back yard is horridly bright and white until the camera quickly re-adjusts and fades to a more natural level? Unbelievably – for people who knew enough to make this production at all – shots in Open Water do the same very unprofessional thing, making it feel like a cheap home video rather than a note-worthy artistic endeavor.

Do I have anything good to say? Yes, actually, two things. Specifically, there is one very admirable shot that captures the essence of Hitchcock’s belief that “Less Seen is More Frightening.” Toward the end, the camera is at water’s level, with waves lapping at the lens, and for a mere fraction of a second, we get a glimpse underwater at the teeming mass of sharks. It goes by so fast, but it is just enough to be absolutely terrifying. (The effect is deflated when we get a longer shot a few seconds later, but by itself the first shot is suspenseful cinematography at its best.)

And generally speaking, I appreciate the effort. Here we have a man taking available pro-sumer technology and fashioning a finished product. Chris Kentis took a boat, a couple cast members, and some crew, and spent several weekends hammering out the production – no easy task. Kentis is living his dream (I assume), and I always reserve a certain amount of applause for fellow novice film makers like myself who actually venture out and get something done. It’s unfortunate that his premiere opus is so hollow and inconsequential on an artistic level; but everyone starts somewhere, and Open Water undoubtedly provided Kentis with experiences that he will improve upon.

My Score: 3