At the bottom of the sea, the crew of an undersea station discover a shipwreck containing a secret biological weapon.
This weapon is an entity which assimilates every organism it comes into contact with. Will the crew destroy the creature before it destroys them?
I am not afraid of water, but for some reason it is a massive phobia when it comes to movies. It is a common joke among my family that I gave up swimming because I thought there were sharks in the pool. Bodies of water, particularly oceans, are fascinating. In movies though, they might as well be the seventh circle of hell for me. This is why I did not watch Jaws until a couple years ago (it was great).
Water is a great vehicle for suspense. If a filmmaker knows what they are doing, viewers can imagine all sorts of ghoulish things gliding beneath the surface. Even a sloppy execution can get past me, if the filmmakers know how to use water.
And if said filmmaker can combine the hidden terrors of the deep with the existential dread of body horror? Welcome to Leviathan.
One of several underwater sci-fi horror movies released in 1989 (the ‘winner’ of the bunch would be James Cameron’s flawed The Abyss), Leviathan feels like a grabbag of Eighties sci fi and horror cliches:
a group of blue collars and scientists in a technologically advanced environment that becomes a nightmarish maze (Alien)
A hidden alien antagonist hunting our heroes down (The Thing, Alien)
An evil corporation looking to monetise this antagonist (Alien/s)
That patchwork quality is part of Leviathan’s charm.
The cast are solid - Peter Weller, Ernie Hudson, Richard Crenna, Meg Foster, Daniel Stern, Hector Elizondo, Lisa Eilbacher and Michael Carmine do not get a lot to do, but they have good chemistry, and they each bring a sliver of personality to their roles. Stern and Hudson are the easy standouts - the former plays the resident sleazeball, while Hudson is a voice of reason (he also gets the film’s best one-liner).
This movie is cheesy, and is pretty shameless in ripping off better movies, but every time I watch it, by the last 15 minutes I am sweating bullets. Even on this occasion, when I watched a good portion of it on my phone.
As our heroes try to escape the collapsing station, it is pretty tense - less so if you have seen Alien, but it works. Leviathan may not have an original idea in its helmet but the filmmakers behind it know how to keep its titular beasty in the shadows or blocked by pieces of the claustrophobic sets.
This is important because the creature is a bit of a mess. It is meant to be an amalgamation of various sea creatures, but there is something underwhelming about the design.
The Thing boasted distinctive forms - the creature in Leviathan always felt like a random mash of different creatures, and they do not have the visceral quality of the earlier film. This might have something to do with the way that these creatures are lit and shot. They always feel like puppets not living entities.
The effects are the movie’s selling point and the fact that they do not quite come off are a good representation of the movie as a whole. Like the creature at its heart, Leviathan feels like a facsimile of a bunch of different components.
While it boasts a big budget, a recognisable cast and technical credits (Stan Winston’s team designed the creatures), at its core, this movie feels like an Italian ripoff of The Thing underwater.
Switch out the Antarctic tundra for the ocean floor and it is basically the same movie. It is nowhere near as good.
There is entertainment to be had, but for me I always have to reframe my expectations.Ultimately, Leviathan is a slasher movie - the characters are developed just enough so you care when they die, and they die in spectacularly gore-y fashion. It is blunt and a little clumsy in execution, but it ends up succeeding in its modest aim.
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