Open Water (2004)

A hard hitting documentary about an innovative new approach to couples therapy.

Open Water is a 2004 thriller directed by Chris Kentis and starring Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis.

I love studio marketing strategies. Occasionally they hit the mark, but more often than not they make hilariously little sense. Open Water was marketed as “The Blair Witch Project meets Jaws”, I assume because it’s filmed on a digital handycam and there’s sharks in it. But it’s there that the similarities end.

Open Water is in fact a pretty effective thriller. I guess the other thing it has in common with Jaws and Blair Witch is that it was made on a very tight budget, and like Jaws, employs the ‘less is more’ approach to building tension. The ‘enemies’ of the piece, the sharks, are glimpsed only briefly as they surface near the stranded couple or brush past their legs. These jump scares are very effective. I particularly liked the moments when Chris and Susan put their scuba masks on and peer below the water. At first, it seems like only one small shark is lurking down there, but each time they peer beneath the waves there are more sharks gathering below.

This film plays into a fear of mine – being stranded in the middle of the ocean (especially the scenes at night). I’m not a strong swimmer, so I wouldn’t last long having to tread water for hours on end.
The lighting during the scene at night is brilliant. It’s pitch darkness punctuated only by flashes of lightning. It amps up the tension perfectly – they can’t see, so neither can we.

I also really like the efforts the film makes to make a statement on human nature – the couple, growing desperate and exhausted, begin to uselessly blame each other for their predicament. I couldn’t help but laugh at the moment where Susan yells “I wanted to go skiing!”

It occasionally goes a little deeper into their relationship, which I also liked. There’s a great moment where Chris, in sheer frustration begins to scream at the ocean around him. I love Susan’s reaction to it – she looks both understanding and annoyed. You know she feels the same way, she is just handling it differently.

I always love films that show the cruel irony of nature – Chris and Susan are dehydrated but surrounded by water they can’t drink. And the film is terrifying because it’s so real. There’s no big Great White menace circling slowly out in the darkness. There are just scores of smaller sharks (I don’t know about you, but if I was stranded on the ocean miles from rescue and running out of hope, any species of shark with its eye on me would have me shitting myself). I love that the sharks bide their time – they simply swarm beneath the couple, waiting. They know they are the top of the food chain in this particular situation.

Unfortunately the film has some stuff working against it. For one thing, the soundtrack is really odd. During a couple of scenes that are supposed to be quite tense and desperate, the film makers use this Polynesian choir that is almost upbeat. It’s so out of place it’s almost comical.

And I don’t like the way the film cuts back to goings on back in Hawaii. At times it’s just random shots of lizards on rocks or palm trees swaying in the breeze, but we also get scenes back at the boat, where the diving guide discovers Chris and Susan’s belongings and realises they are missing. I can only assume the film makers did this to trick us into thinking that maybe the couple will be rescued, but I found these scenes unnecessary primarily because they break the tension. The film would have been far more effective if we the audience were trapped with the stranded couple.

Anyway, after one of the final cuts back to the couple we see that Chris has died due to blood loss from a small bite from one of the sharks. It’s a really nice moment from Susan as she begins to cry and pushes him away. I then love the final reveal – Susan once again puts on her scuba mask and looks into the water, and we see scores of sharks circling right below her. I love that she simply resigns herself to her fate, and slowly removes her scuba gear and sinks beneath the water. It’s a chilling moment that is again somewhat ruined by that stupid choir music. It’s like the film makers weren’t confident enough to simply let the scene play out in silence.

And the epilogue is really bizarre. We see a freshly caught shark being carved up with a knife – it’s fins are cut off and it’s then gutted. It’s supposed to again be some kind of statement about nature, but it comes across more like “Hey you murdering little bastards, you may have won this round...but I feel a hankering for shark fin soup tonight! Mwahahahahaha!”

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

What the hell does Ridley Scott have against horses?

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a 2014 epic directed by Ridley Scott and starring Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver.

This film has got to set some kind of record for most violent acts against horses. I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to any kind of film violence, but a couple of scenes in this had even me shaking my head. I don’t mind big battle scenes where men on horseback charge each other and both men and steeds are killed in the ensuing chaos. I don’t mind it because I’ve seen it in so many movies it barely even registers anymore and my reptilian brain knows it’s all just foam latex and CGI.

But there’s two scenes in Exodus that feature horses getting slaughtered for no apparent reason. The first is the tidal wave that comes to swallow up Pharaoh’s army after Moses has parted the Red Sea. For some reason, Ridley Scott decides to have a horse bolting away from the wave, and we see the damn thing get washed away quite brutally. Was this to show the force of the wave? The height of the wave? It’s a goddamn tidal wave. We know it’s big and powerful because thirty seconds later we see a freakin army get swamped by it.

The second is Moses’ horse after he’s been swamped by the wave and Moses washes up on the beach. For some insane reason he looks out into the water and we see his horse being ripped apart by sharks. The scene is not overly gory, it’s just maddeningly unnecessary. It serves absolutely no purpose in the film.

Anyway, unexplained gratuitous equine violence aside, on to the film. Ridley Scott is my all time favourite director. I think he’s brilliant, unique, extremely talented and makes interesting, thought provoking and entertaining films.

So it pains me to say that I didn’t enjoy Exodus: Gods and Kings. Aside from some brilliant production design and some few-and-far-between moments, for the most part the film is confusing and dull.

Although it clocks in and over two and a half hours, it seems like a 4 hour film that’s been massacred in the editing room. Characters make unexplained decisions that make little sense, transitions between locations and scenes are sometimes jarring, an early plotline goes nowhere...the list goes on. The entire second act of the film is just a jumbled, confusing mess. No sooner could I latch on to the story and settle in, thinking it was finally going to make sense, the film would transition to something else and never resolve the thought it began. Watching the film is sort of like trying to carry on a conversation with someone in the latter stages of severe dementia. They can’t keep a train of thought, trail off in the middle of sentences and tell stories that don’t have points or conclusions. The film had four screen writers, two of whom did rewrites, and it shows.

And, it’s like Ridley Scott has a deal with the studios – they get him to whack a big set piece battle at the beginning of his films, and then once that’s out of the way he’s free to make the film he actually set out to make (see Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood). The battle at the beginning of Exodus is easily the best part of the film, unfortunately aside from setting up a sort of rivalry between Ramses (Joel Edgerton) and Moses (Christian Bale), it has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It’s completely abstract from everything that follows. What’s more, it doesn’t even set up the rivalry all that well. At least in films like Gladiator and Robin Hood the battles at the start had some place in the overall story. They made sense.

Not much in Exodus makes any sense. As I’ve said, it seems like a much longer movie that has had huge chunks of exposition excised. Probably the most jarring example of this is Moses’ wedding. In the space of about ten minutes of screen time, he’s gone from being exiled in the desert, to being taken in by the villagers, to being madly in love and married. It’s incredibly rushed and doesn’t allow you to invest at all in his wife’s character or his relationship with her.

Slightly less jarring but nonetheless confusing is Ramses sudden decision to not trust Moses after Moses has returned from Pithen with the Viceroy. At least during this scene Moses seems as confused as I was that he was suddenly ejected from the room with all the servants leaving Ramses and the Viceroy to scheme and plot his exile. I get the basic gist of it, but again, the whole sequence leading up to Moses exile to the desert seems horribly rushed.

The film has some good points. As we’ve come to expect from Ridley Scott, the film is visually stunning and extremely well made. Everything about the film is polished – the production design, the costuming, the special effects. It has some superb stunt work and stunning visuals involving large scale battles and sandstorms. And of course the plague of locusts, the Nile turning to blood, all that stuff looks awesome. The panoramic shots of Alexandria and Pithen are an incredible blend of model work, practical effects and CGI. I really struggled to tell where the real and the fake merged. Ancient Egypt has never looked so amazing, and so real. It’s really brought to life.

The performances are mostly good. Christian Bale has become adept at playing characters who are batshit crazy yet relatable and that we can sympathise with, and he does that to its full effect with his portrayal of Moses. Joel Edgerton is also good. He’s not among my favourite actors, but he plays Ramses as scarily intimidating yet childishly pathetic. It’s a nice performance. And John Turturro is fantastic as Seti. He’s not in the film very long, but he’s a joy to watch in every scene he’s in.

Another performance worth mentioning is God-kid. Firstly, I loved that Ridley Scott went with neither man nor woman to portray God. He threw a kid in there. This could have been laughable, except that the child actor is incredible. He’s by turns menacing and benevolent, often both in the same breath. I really can’t do the performance justice here, the kid is simply brilliant.

Ridley Scott dedicates the film to his brother Tony, who tragically committed suicide. Knowing this at the end, the scenes between Ramses and Moses suddenly took on a deeper meaning. I wish he had of spent more time on the relationship between these two men than on trying to make a Biblical epic in the vein of The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur. This was two and half really disappointing hours.