Leviathan (1989) Review
5/10
A mining crew on the sea floor finds a sunken Soviet vessel, brings something back, and starts turning into it.
1989 produced The Abyss, DeepStar Six and this inside seven months of each other, which is one of the odder coincidences in genre history and was not a coincidence at all.
Cameron’s is the good one. This is the second best, which on that scale is not a compliment.
The 5 is for a film that is watchable, well cast, and entirely derivative. Peter Weller and Richard Crenna are better than the script, Stan Winston’s creature work is genuinely good, Jerry Goldsmith wrote the score, and every structural beat is lifted from Alien without alteration.
It Is Alien Underwater
The blue-collar crew who want to finish the job and get their bonus. The corporate representative with instructions the crew does not know about. The infected member who hides it. The transformation. The isolated setting with no rescue for hours. The self-destruct option. The final survivor and the creature in the water.
There is nothing wrong with working inside a template, and this film does not do anything with it. Every beat arrives where you expect, in the order you expect, performed competently.
What it lacks is the thing Alien had that everybody copies and nobody replicates, which is patience. Scott spends forty minutes on people eating, complaining about shares and arguing about a distress signal before anything happens. That time is what makes the rest work.
This film has its first incident inside twenty minutes and never stops, and the effect is that nothing accumulates. There is no stretch where the audience is simply living with these people.
The crew are also given single characteristics instead of relationships. One is greedy, one is frightened, one is professional. In Alien you know who resents whom.
The corporate villain is played by Meg Foster in a total of about four minutes, on a video link, which is the film’s laziest borrowing and its most efficient.
Borrowing a structure is legitimate and common; the failure here is borrowing the sequence of events and not the pacing that made them work. Alien is frightening because it is slow first, and the slowness is not atmosphere, it is investment.
The mechanism is that dread requires something to lose. Forty minutes of people being ordinary establishes what normality looks like on that ship, and every subsequent scene is measured against it. Remove the forty minutes and the audience has nothing to compare the horror to, so the horror is merely events.
The test on your own work is to find the first genuinely frightening or violent thing in your draft and count the pages before it. Then ask what the reader knows about your characters by that point. If the answer is their names and their jobs, you have written incident. If the answer includes who irritates whom and what each of them wants from the trip, you have written stakes.
The Creature Is the Best Thing
Stan Winston built a practical monster made of the crew members it has absorbed, and it is a genuinely unpleasant design. Recognizable faces in the wrong places, partially dissolved, still apparently conscious.
That idea is better than the film containing it. A creature assembled from your dead colleagues, who can still be seen inside it and may still be aware, is a real horror concept and it belongs in a stronger picture.
The intermediate stages are the best of it. A hand that is not quite a hand. A man whose skin is going wrong while he insists he is fine. Winston’s team was doing this work in the same period as Predator and Aliens and the standard is visible.
The film shows it too clearly and too often, which is the usual mistake. The final full-body reveal is a rubber creature in water and it undoes twenty minutes of restraint that came before.
There is a case that the design is too busy. Alien’s creature works partly because it is simple enough to read instantly in low light. This one is a mass of details that need a clear shot to register, and clear shots are what kill monsters.
Goldsmith’s score is also better than the film, which is a thing that happened frequently in his career.
Why 1989 Produced Three of These
The Abyss was in production, expensive, and widely known about in the industry. Two lower-budget productions moved quickly to reach cinemas first, which was a standard tactic of the period.
DeepStar Six arrived in January, this in March, The Abyss in August. There was also Lords of the Deep and The Evil Below in the same year, both direct to video, which takes the count to five.
The interesting part is that being first bought neither of the leaders anything. Both were forgotten and The Abyss is the one people remember, despite also underperforming commercially at the time.
Speed to market is worth very little when the thing being made is not distinctive, which is a lesson available in most industries and rarely learned in any of them.
The producers were not stupid. The calculation was that audiences would want an underwater monster film in 1989 and that arriving early would capture that demand. The demand was real and it went to the good one.
There is a similar cluster with the volcano films in 1997 and the asteroid films in 1998, and the pattern holds each time.
Arriving first with an inferior version of an idea is almost always a losing move, and the reason is worth being precise about. Audiences and readers do not consume a category, they consume specific works, and a category they have sampled badly makes them less likely to try the next one.
For a writer the practical version is the rush to publish on a trend. If a subject is suddenly commercial, the temptation is to produce something quickly while the window is open, and the arithmetic looks sound. What really happens is that the definitive treatment arrives eighteen months later and yours becomes the one nobody mentions.
The test is to ask whether your version of the idea would be worth reading if the trend did not exist. If the answer is yes, speed is a bonus and you should proceed. If the honest answer is that the timing is the reason, you are writing DeepStar Six, and the better use of the same months is finding the thing only you would write.
The Cast Is Doing Real Work
Peter Weller had made RoboCop two years earlier and plays the reluctant leader with a dryness the script does not support. He is the one giving the film a register above its material.
Richard Crenna is the doctor and is genuinely good, playing a man who has worked out what is happening well before he says so and is calculating whether to say it at all.
Ernie Hudson, Amanda Pays, Daniel Stern and Hector Elizondo round it out, and Stern in particular is doing the sleazy crew member as a specific person instead of a type.
That is why the film is watchable. A derivative script performed by people who have decided to take it seriously produces something considerably better than the same script performed cynically.
George Cosmatos directed, having made Rambo: First Blood Part II and going on to Tombstone, and the direction is efficient without being interesting.
It was shot at Cinecitta in Rome, which was cheaper than American stages and is why several films of this period have a slightly unplaceable look.
What the Subgenre Requires
The underwater monster film has specific requirements and it is worth naming them, because Leviathan meets some and misses the important one.
Pressure is the first. At depth, the environment itself will kill you, and every hull, seal and window is a countdown. The Abyss uses this constantly and it is the reason that film is frightening even when nothing is chasing anybody.
Communication delay is the second. A crew on the sea floor cannot be reached quickly, cannot leave quickly, and cannot be told anything in real time. That is a stronger isolation than space, because the surface is visible and unreachable at the same time.
And decompression is the third, which is the one nobody uses properly. Getting out takes hours whatever happens. There is no running.
Leviathan mentions all three and builds on none. The crew are near the end of a rotation, the surface is a video call away, and the ascent is treated as a matter of getting to a capsule.
The Abyss, by contrast, has a sequence where a woman is deliberately drowned because cold water and CPR are a better bet than the distance to the surface, and it is unbearable precisely because the environment has been established as the enemy from the first reel.
Every setting carries its own built-in antagonist and using it costs nothing. At depth the pressure is trying to kill everybody at all times, and a writer who establishes that has a source of tension available in every scene without inventing a threat.
The step most people skip is making the environment operate early, before the plot’s threat arrives. Show a seal weeping. Show somebody checking a gauge out of habit. Establish that getting out takes six hours. Do it in the first act while nothing is wrong, and the environment will do half your work for the rest of the book.
The test is to remove your antagonist entirely and ask whether the setting still generates danger. If the answer is no, you have chosen a backdrop instead of a place, and you will spend the whole story manufacturing threats that the location should have been supplying for free.
Should you watch Leviathan?
If you like the subgenre and have already seen The Abyss and Alien, yes. It is watchable, well acted and entirely derivative, and Winston’s creature deserved a better film. If you have not seen The Abyss, watch that instead and come back to this one only if you want more.
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This film appears on 4 of my film lists