Saw it yesterday. Here's my addition to WebMonkey's impressions:
(Spoiler warniing - I'm giving away a few plot twists below, so don't read this if you expect to be kept in suspense by the story.)
First of all, it's not as bad as it looked, and not nearly as bad as the trailer led me to expect.
Lots of Jessica Alba/Paul Walker flesh tease. Lots of freediving and that little undulating dolphin swim thing by a bikini-clad Jessica. Pleasant, but not worth going to see the movie. And for you hetero women, Paul shows lots of flesh too. No nudity on either side.
The photography was beautiful. I think they shunted the money for the script to the film crew, with great results. Too bad they weren't able to have a decent script and pretty pictures.
As far as scuba goes, the technical advisors were pretty lame. Two OOA emergencies (Like WM said, the only time they looked at their gauges where when they were at zero.) One of the OOAs had mouth-to-mouth buddy breathing, with donor Jessica getting her supply from a lift bag. And am I the only one to notice that nobody had an octo?
Lots of 7-8 minute free dives, including penetration dives. I think they did more breathhold diving in this than in the Big Blue! (It's a film about freedivers, for those who haven't seen it.) I'd have liked to see some more realistic use of scuba for these scenes.
Man, if only I knew that excavating a wreck was so easy. Swim along the sand, find some gold artifacts, come back with a metal detector and a scooter to blow away the sand. And was it just me, or did that metal detector sound like a Geiger counter? Maybe it was radioactive treasure. A great subplot for the sequel.
Predictably, there was a subplot about drug smugglers a'la The Deep. And some annoying banter between a couple of characters as they tried to work through their great moral dilema of whether to salvage a planeload of cocaine to finance their underwater archeology. Predictably, the Sea Gods have their vengence on the druggies, as we would expect from this sort of thing. At least we didn't have Donald Sutherland representing some military/government conspiracy...
And the sharks. Jessica does a good job at the beginning teaching children about shark behavior. Too bad that there are a couple of nice'n bloody shark attacks later in the film. But the sharks did inspire a fight with powerheads, so that was a plus.
All in all, it was a beautifully shot film with a predictable plot and vapid characters. The scuba scenes could have been taken from 1970, riddled as they were with cliches. I'd have liked to see an intelligent plot and some mature acting matched with the photography, but that seems to be too much to ask from a Hollywood film these days. I guess that's why I like independent films, despite their shortcomings. I just find it a little sad that PADI and Scuba Diving, those bastions of mainstream diving culture, believe that this film will inspire legions of new divers. If that's the case, we'd better get used to seeing lots more OOA situations, lots more reef damage, and lots of untrained divers doing penetrations. Just what our sport needs...
Safe ascents,
Grier
They are going for the eye candy and the "story" . . . ok mostly the eye candy.
