Open Water
Category: Movies...
Posted Friday, August 27, 2004 at 08:10 PM [GMT-6]

MLB and I caught a matinee showing of Open Water this afternoon, and came away with the feeling that it's not a movie that will appeal to a wide audience.

This movie deals with the predicament of a pair of scuba divers who were inadvertently left behind by the dive boat miles from shore. As if that weren't enough to ruin a good day of diving, they found themselves in shark-infested waters. The story is presumably based on an actual event.

Being certified divers, we identified closely with the characters and their surroundings. The "cattle car" operation where 20 or more divers are crammed onto one boat is a familiar and realistic scene for resort divers, although more experienced divers seek out operators who limit their passenger count. The gear snafu that leads to the miscounting of returning divers is also realistic; there seems to be one guy on every dive trip who makes everyone around him adjust to his priorities.

And, in our experience, there's also one couple who usually pushes the limits in terms of "doing their own thing" on a dive...making the boat wait for them, going deeper or farther than recommended by the guide, or simply not staying in sight of the main group. The unfortunate couple in this movie suffered some extreme consequences as a result of such behavior.

I can't say anything more about the plot without spoiling it. It's not an uplifting movie, and it could inspire some uncomfortable feelings depending on one's perspective.

My wife and I were once temporarily separated on a dive. It's been six or seven years, and I can still feel the clutch in my chest when I realized that I didn't know where she was. I surfaced, as protocol in such situations requires, but she didn't. In fact, she was unaware that we weren't together and continued to blithely inspect the reef and its inhabitants, completely unaware of my dismay. When she finally noticed my absence, she surfaced as well, not more than fifty feet from me. I alternated between tear-inducing anger and relief; I didn't want to experience that feeling ever again.

This short film (only 79 minutes) asks you to consider how you'd react in a situation where your life and that of a loved one are threatened. There wasn't much that was heroic about the couple in the movie, and I left without the feeling of inspiration that I had expected. It also won't do much to swell the ranks of new scuba divers, even though the shark interaction is completely atypical of the diving in the Caribbean that we've done over the years. (The real-life event that inspired the film took place off the coast of Australia, which is a whole different ballgame.)

Overall, the movie was disappointing and I can't recommend it, despite its pretensions to cult status. The production values were low, but we expected that, given the movie's teensie budget. There was some surprisingly graphic nudity and a good deal of strong language, which grew stronger as the situation grew bleaker.

Worst of all, the incessant water-bobbing finally made MLB ill (a not unfrequent occurrence for her, by the way; she's extremely susceptible to motion sickness). Talk about adding injury to insult.