(**1/2)
“We’re going to be right in the middle of the storm,” says a concerned crew member. Something horrible could happen. Something tragic.
The storyline in this feature film adaptation can be traced back to the 2019 British documentary Last Breath, directed by Alex Parkinson and Richard da Costa. And that doc used archival footage, audio, reconstruction and interviews to recreate a real incident that happened in September 2012. That’s when stormy weather endangered the lives of the tethered saturation divers Chris Lemons, Dave Yuasa, and Duncan Allock. Theywere 300 feet below the surface in the North Sea and at the mercy of anyone who could help. Certainly, solid dramatic thrillers have be concocted on premises with far less potential than this.
Parkinson steps away from his strong background in doc filmmaking to try his hand at a feature film. He and the other filmmakers get the most obvious points right. The characters, story and facts are in place. There’s a beginning, middle and end. It almost seems like the project was so easy, they forgot to add in all the complications and subtexts that make pretty good dra/thr movies excellent. They took a paint-by-numbers approach when ingenuity would have served them better.
Chris Lemmons (Finn Cole, Peaky Blinders) finds it hard to leave his fiancée Morag (Bobby Rainsbury), each time he goes off on an assignment. His job is dangerous. Fixing pipeline deep under water is fraught with risks. Each time he says good bye, you never know. It could be the last time. Lemmons is comforted when he meets his three-man crew members.
Duncan Allock (Woody Harrelson, Natural Born Killers) is a veteran. Cock sure, ready to retire, unphased by all the hazards. Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu, Barbie) is sullen. Hard to get through to him, but he’s professional. The three reside in a pod, something like a dorm room under the sea. Lemmons and Yuasa venture to the ocean floor to check and mend pipes. Tethered by cables that feed them oxygen, communicating as they labor, together and separately.
Up above, the sea starts to rage. Strong winds push the Bibby Topaz, their support ship, around like a toy boat. The vessel’s crew becomes increasingly alarmed. Craig the Dive Supervisor (Mark Bonnar), guides and assures the men below. The 1st Officer Hanna (MyAnna Buring) notes the weather, its velocity and the potential jeopardy. The Captain, Andre Jenson (Cliff Curtis, Once Were Warriors), weighs alternatives and tries to juggle the mission along with everyone’s safety. Averting disaster won’t be easy.
Allock and Yuasa’s backgrounds are sketchy. Lemmon is the character who’s been developed. Audiences can understand the high stakes at his newish job. He’s fragile, untested and less able to deal with mishaps on his own. That makes him a worthy, vulnerable protagonist. For a traditional narrative to play out, he needs to fight the odds and antagonists—even if the villain is nature. In a way he does, but largely the film, possibly due to facts, takes that journey out of his hands. The audience follows the rescue mission more from everyone else’s viewpoint, and not so much from his. That takes some of the film’s potential strength away.
Still, it’s easy enough to let your emotions get into that “I hope the man left behind survives” mode.” Most audiences will stay glued to the footage for its 93 succinct minutes (editor Tania Goding). Most won’t leave the theater or hit the remote until they find out if Lemmons lives or dies. And the dying part is super scary because it would be very tragic.
This looks and feels like a small budget project. The production design (Grant Montgomery) seems slight, except for the ship’s control boards. The costumes didn’t break the bank (Vanessa Loh), either. The trickiest part of the production has to be getting the ship to look like it’s being thrown around like a buoy. That feat never looks real. It’s either CGI or a ship in a tank with fake motion in the ocean. The underwater cinematography (Nick Remy Matthews, Hotel Mumbai) only yields murky H2O. Fortunately, the ominous musical score (Paul Leonard Morgan) consistently ups the tension, and the heavy sounds and stark silence are equally effective because the sound department is deft.
Parkinson put’s the camera in the right place, stages scenes decently and builds pressure when he should. But he doesn’t do much more than that. It’s as if he’s relying on the chronological order of events to pull audiences through. It does. And that’s a good thing, as his direction is pretty straight forward, lacks artsy styling or the moxie a seasoned action/thriller director would bring.
Liu has a face and charm that could launch a thousand ships. Pity his character is so dour. Harrelson, usually the life of the party, has toned down his act for this role. Curtis, as the captain, reminds us of his acting prowess and that he’s never in enough movies. Rainsbury and Cole convince us that they’re a loving couple. She is more emotive than he. When she pleads “Come home. Please come home,” it haunts you. When he says, in a blasé way, “Once you step outside, it’s like you’re stealing every second,” you know the life and death aspects of his job are real. Wish his fear was more exaggerated. Deeper.
Being leagues under the sea is as dangerous as being up high in outer space. What the film Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock, got so right was that it concentrated on her, not other characters. What Last Breath gets wrong, is that the rescue shouldn’t be the scene stealer. What happens to Lemmons as he may be breathing his last breath should be the focal point. Stuck on the ocean floor, floating in and out of a reality all his own. Had the filmmakers concentrated more on his spiritual, near end-of-life state, it might have found the dimension it’s missing.
Flawed. Lacks artistry. Too comfortable with the physical experience and not the ethereal one. But still a nailbiter. Still a stormy experience.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNMyooXZZTM
Visit Film Critic Dwight Brown at DwightBrownInk.com.