Tuesday, December 08, 2020

DeepStar Six

As far as "'80s movies about weird crap at the bottom of the ocean", I assume The Abyss is at the top. A few rungs down from that is Leviathan, and several more rungs down from that, would be this thing.

A crew at the bottom of the ocean is supposed to be installing some sort of nuclear missile launch sled, but the place they planned to set it is over an enormous cavern. In a hurry to meet deadlines, the lead guy says just blow up the roof of the cavern and build on its floor. Which unleashes a 10-meter long arthropod that begins killing the crew.

The movie is at least smart enough to only show bits of the creature for most of the film. A gaping set of mandibles, or one giant claw. I'm not sure it should have been able to follow the escape sub to the surface without dying from the pressure change. Doesn't that happen to giant squids and some deep-sea fish when we haul them up?

There's one interesting subplot concerning the character Snyder (played by Miguel Ferrer), who has clearly been down there too long. He's under strain, and wants to get back to the surface, and nobody really seems to care too much. Maybe he's always a surly guy, but as people start dying, more responsibility gets placed on him, without any support, and things go badly. He cuts corners, doesn't call people to confirm decisions, because everyone is yelling at him to just get it done, and he ends up making a bad decision that makes escape near-impossible. Then he freaks out when the creature gets inside their station, which hey, understandable.

Of course, then the movie decides to have him steal the main escape pod and abandon the rest of them, only to die horrible because he didn't go through decompression first. So any credit I might have given it for showing that pressure gets to people, and it isn't fair to place all blame on one guy who wasn't helped, get promptly thrown in a barrel and sent to the bottom of the sea.

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