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. That’s one of the odder coincidences in genre history and wasn’t a coincidence at all.
Cameron’s is the good one. This is the second best, which on that scale isn’t a compliment. My feeling about Leviathan is mild affection mixed with irritation. I enjoy it while it’s on, the way I’d enjoy a decent cover band, and it evaporates about an hour after the credits. The frustrating part is that the pieces for a much better film are sitting right there on the sea floor and nobody picks them up.
The 5 is for a film that’s watchable, well cast, and entirely derivative. Peter Weller and Richard Crenna are better than the script, Stan Winston’s creature work is 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 doesn’t 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’s nothing wrong with working inside a template, and this film doesn’t 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. That’s patience. Scott spends forty minutes on people eating, complaining about shares and arguing about a distress signal before anything happens. That time makes the rest work.
This film has its first incident inside twenty minutes and never stops, and the effect is that nothing accumulates. There’s 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.
Those one-note crew members lose me. I’d trade half the creature footage for ten minutes of these people griping about the bonus before anything goes wrong. The film seems scared the audience will get bored, and that fear is exactly what makes it dull. Meg Foster plays the corporate villain in a total of about four minutes, on a video link. That’s the film’s laziest borrowing and its most efficient.
Borrowing a structure is legitimate and common; the failure here’s borrowing the sequence of events and not the pacing that made them work. Alien is frightening because it’s slow first, and the slowness isn’t atmosphere, it’s 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 later 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 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’ve written incident. If the answer includes who irritates whom and what each of them wants from the trip, you’ve written stakes.
The Creature Is the Best Thing
Stan Winston built a practical monster made of the crew members it’s absorbed, and it’s a nasty design. Recognizable faces sit in the wrong places, partially dissolved and still apparently conscious. I think it’s the most frightening thing in the film by a wide margin, and the only element I’d call inspired.
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’s not quite a hand. A man whose skin is going wrong while he insists he’s 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. That’s 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’s a case that the design is too busy.
Alien’s creature works partly because it’s simple enough to read instantly in low light. This one is a mass of details that needs a clear shot to register, and clear shots are what kill monsters. I’d have kept it in the dark for the whole film and let us guess.
Goldsmith’s score is also better than the film. That’s 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. That 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. That 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 isn’t distinctive. That’s a lesson available in most industries and rarely learned in any of them.
The producers weren’t 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’s 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 don’t consume a category, they consume specific works, and a category they’ve 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.
Ask whether your version of the idea would be worth reading if the trend didn’t exist. If the answer is yes, speed is a bonus and you should proceed. If The timing is the reason, you’re writing DeepStar Six, and the better use of the same months is finding the thing only you’d 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 doesn’t support. He’s the one giving the film a tone above its material. Richard Crenna is the doctor and is good, playing a man who has worked out what’s 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’s 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.
Weller is the main reason this scrapes to a 5. He plays every scene like a man who’s read the script and decided to be better than it anyway, and Crenna’s quiet calculation is the most interesting thing any character does. I’d happily watch this cast again in a script that deserved them.
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’s 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’s the reason that film is frightening even when nothing is chasing anybody. Communication delay is the second. A crew on the sea floor can’t be reached quickly, can’t leave quickly, and can’t be told anything in real time. That’s a stronger isolation than space, because the surface is visible and unreachable at the same time. And decompression is the third. That’s the one nobody uses properly. Getting out takes hours whatever happens. There’s 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.
That’s the biggest missed opportunity. Decompression alone could have carried the third act: a crew who knows the thing is loose and knows they can’t leave for hours. The premise handed the film that idea and the film walked right past it.
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’s unbearable because the film has established the environment 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’s a source of tension available in every scene without inventing a threat.
The step most people skip is making the environment work 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.
Remove your antagonist entirely and ask whether the setting still generates danger. If the answer is no, you’ve chosen a backdrop instead of a place, and you’ll 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 you’ve already seen The Abyss and Alien, go ahead.
It’s a 5 because it’s watchable, well acted and entirely derivative, and because Winston’s creature and Weller’s dryness keep it afloat while the script sinks around them. I wish somebody had slowed it down for twenty minutes and given that monster a better film. If you haven’t seen The Abyss, watch that first.
