Open Water (Widescreen Edition)
by Chris Kentis
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Blanchard Ryan, Cristina Zenato, Daniel Travis, Michael E. Williamson, Saul SteinDirector: Chris Kentis
Brand: Lions Gate
Producer: Estelle Lau
Cinematographer: Chris Kentis
Editor: Chris Kentis
Writer: Chris Kentis
Cinematographer: Laura Lau
Producer: Laura Lau
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, NTSC, Surround Sound, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 79 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-12-28
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Lions Gate Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Open Water (Widescreen Edition)
Movie Review: Reality Bites
Summary: 5 Stars
About a quarter of the way into "Open Water", yuppy-in-peril Susan (Blanchard Ryan), floating like one big unhappy cork in a shark-infested corner of the Pacific, whimpers of their new shark buddies "I don't know which is worse---seeing them or not seeing them."
I'm going to pick "not seeing Them" as the greater of two evils. Ignorance, in Chris Kentis's wickedly bleak nugget of grue, is not bliss.
It's Death.
Filmed on a shoestring budget (130,000 bones, I'm told) and shot on high-end digital, "Open Water" films like a documentary: a camera follows the Caribbean vacation of two stressed-out yuppies-in-love (or something like it), chronicles their much needed jaunt to the Bahamas, follows them out on a dive-boat for a little underwater spelunking, captures their surprise when, surfacing 30 minutes later, they find the dive boat gone---and, with rare exceptions (and only then to rub salt, heh heh, in the wound), never leaves their side throughout the ordeal that follows.
Let's get the basics out of the way: for all the budget constraints, "Open Water" looks great. Digital video (used in another horror classic "Session 9") has a way of leeching the colors out of scenery, but in this case it's fine: it gives "Open Water" the feel of a well-executed home video---"Blair Witch" without motion sickness---and makes the flick more accessible.
There are some slick, deft little cinematic touches, as when the camera slips down beneath the surface of the water for a few teasing shots of dorsal fins and dead black eyes slicing through the gloom.
The acting is equally makeshift---not great, but---again---given the flick's budget, it gets the job done. Blanchard Ryan (Susan) and Daniel Travis (Daniel) do what they have to do as work-obsessed stressed-out yuppies, the kind usually yapping on their cell phones in movie theaters. They yap into their cell-phones, they coordinate their clothes well, they decompress, they scr*w, they worry about the clock again, they insert themselves into the great global food chain without a second thought (because, man, you know---even if you're in paradise, you've got to be doing something, right?), they bicker, and---well, you'll see.
Once Susan and Daniel pop up in an empty ocean, they're surprised, a little astounded, slightly worried. But only slightly. Things like this don't happen to upwardly mobile techno-hipsters, right? So they sink back into their life jackets, tell a few jokes, wait for help to arrive.
What that means is that "Open Water" becomes a waiting game to see which happens first: either 1) the diveboat crew realizes their mistake, and dispatches rescuers to save our unhappy duo; 2) the increasingly interested grey reef sharks circling the two decide to throw reserve to the wind and take a hearty chunk of a little human au vin, nicely simmered in a little saltwater vinaigrette.
There are two reasons why I dig---and very much appreciate---Kentis's little sea dog of a horror-show.First: Kentis makes some very subtle points about just how much effort it takes to create and maintain the world in which our two happy, clueless yuppies---proxies for ourselves---flounder about.
There's a juicy little sequence that takes all of two seconds: you see a coconut poised on a tabletop, seconds before a machete slices down through it with massive, startling force, slicing off the coconut's top. An instant later, the coconut seller passes two sliced coconuts to Susan and Daniel, who proceed to insert---delicately, comically---two little straws, and commence sipping.
The point I'm getting at is this: in mastering our environment through technology, we have insulated ourselves from the very Nature our ancestors fought with, bled against, died before. Even the most stringently vegan among us does his hunting and gathering and growing in grocery stores. The stalking and skinning, the sowing and reaping, have all been done for us, by people we do not see, by efforts we do not fathom.
Do we not take a massive gamble, then, in inserting our foolish selves back into that bloodthirsty food-chain?
The second thing I dig about "Open Water" is its cold-blooded nihilism. Both "Jaws" and "Deep Blue Sea" are both, at heart, movies about Good and Evil doing battle. "Open Water" dispenses with such niceties. You see that gorgeous, rippling expanse of ocean? There are monsters gliding beneath the surface, there are things with Teeth, and they want to rip open your flesh and drink your blood devour you screaming.
That is the world, and the world is full of Hungry Things. Hungry Things that don't care about your high-tone zip code, or the make and model of your hip new cell-phone; Hungry Things that make no distinction between wrinkled peasant pearl-fisher and gym-hardened urban hipster. Hungry Things that don't really care whether you've got your credit together, or got a killer portfolio, or two BMWs parked in the garage of your three-story townhouse.
Call on God, your Lawyer, or even your Broker: in the end, beneath the Moon and under the stars, adrift on the Open Water, caught without water in the high Desert, dying of hunger in some lonely Alpine pass---the only Truth is Appetite. The only Law is Force. And the only Exit is Death.
JSG
Summary of Open Water (Widescreen Edition)
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