Open Water (film)
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| Open Water | |
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| Directed by | Chris Kentis |
| Produced by | Laura Lau |
| Written by | Chris Kentis |
| Starring | Blanchard Ryan Daniel Travis Saul Stein Estelle Lau Jon-Damon Charles |
| Distributed by | Lions Gate Films |
| Release date(s) | 26 October 2003 |
| Running time | 79 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $ 130,000 |
| Followed by | Open Water 2 |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Open Water is a 2003 film inspired by a true story about an American couple, Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who in 1998 went out with a scuba diving group, Outer Edge Dive Company, into the South Pacific. They were accidentally left behind because the dive-boat crew failed to take an accurate headcount. There were 26 other divers and five crew members, all of whom failed to notice that the couple was not on board.
The film was financed by director Chris Kentis and his wife, producer Laura Lau, both avid scuba divers. The movie cost $130,000 to make and was bought by Lions Gate Films for $2.5 million after its screening at the Sundance Film Festival. Before filming began, the Lonergans' experience was re-created for an episode of ABC's 20/20, and the segment was repeated after the release of Open Water.
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[edit] Plot
Daniel Kintner (Daniel Travis) and Susan Watkins (Blanchard Ryan) are an unmarried couple frustrated that their hard-working lives don't allow them to spend much time together. The last names of the main characters (revealed on their ID cards) are the same as Alex Kintner and Chrissie Watkins, two of the shark attack victims in Jaws.
They decide to pack up and head out on a scubadiving vacation to help relieve their everyday stress and improve their relationship. On their second day, Daniel and Susan join a group scuba dive. Some on board their boat express nervousness about sharks, but the dive instructor dismisses the danger with a joke. There is a head count, and the passenger total is recorded as 20.
Daniel and Susan hop in the water along with the rest of the divers. One man, Seth, has forgotten his mask and stays on board. Daniel and Susan decide to separate from the group while underwater. A woman who's having problems with pressure equalization returns early with her partner. There are already three people back on the boat. This is recorded as "three" back on board. After this tally, Seth asks to borrow the mask of the woman who just surfaced, and he coerces the woman's reluctant dive partner into another dive. The tally is not changed because the man taking the tally did not see this happen. Half an hour later, the rest of the group returns to the boat. Going by the two earlier tallies, the total on board comes to 20, though in reality it is 18. The boat leaves, and no one notices that Daniel and Susan are not aboard.
Soon after the boat leaves, Daniel and Susan return to the surface and look for the boat. They believe the boat will return for them, assuming someone on board would notice their belongings.
Stranded at sea, Daniel and Susan rehash old disputes, bicker about the wisdom of swimming for boats seen in the distance, battle bouts of hunger and mental exhaustion, and notice sharks circling them from below the surface. Susan is afraid of the sharks; Daniel tries to calm her, saying, "Sharks are attracted to wounded fish," so they should try their best to stay calm and not splash around. Soon they are wounded by jellyfish, while several times sharks appear to try to figure out what they are. Susan is bitten by a shark, but doesn't realize it. Daniel notices this as he goes under to check out the "nipping" feeling she has. He sees that it's small fish feeding on her bite wounds but doesn't tell her that it's a shark bite.
Later, a shark bites Daniel, and the wound begins to bleed profusely. Susan removes her diving belt and uses it to apply pressure to Daniel's wound. He appears to begin to go into shock. Susan herself is afraid, telling him to "just keep breathing," which confuses him. The diving suits keep them from realizing they're being bitten. That night, during a strong storm, sharks return and again attack Daniel, killing him.
The next morning, the pair's belongings are finally found on the boat, and a search begins. Meanwhile, Susan, having held on to Daniel through the night, finally realizes he is dead and releases him into the water, where sharks attack in a feeding frenzy. Susan finds something about the movement of his body (the odd bobbing) suspicious. After putting on her goggles, she looks under the surface, and sees several sharks circling her in the water and one seems to dart her way. Susan appears to decide to give up, as she stops trying to keep herself afloat, and allows herself to sink underwater by releasing air from her mouth. The audience is never told or shown her fate, but are left to assume she fell victim to the sharks, as Daniel had. Her last scene shows her releasing her scuba tanks and intentionally drowning herself.
As the credits roll after Susan slips below the water, a crew of fishermen cuts open the insides of a shark's stomach, finding an underwater camera, similar to what Daniel and Susan had. One of the dissectors asks, "Wonder if it works?"
[edit] Production
Open Water is notable in that the filmmakers used living sharks, as opposed to the mechanical ones used in Jaws or the computer-generated fish in Deep Blue Sea. The movie strives for authentic shark behavior, shunning the stereotypical exaggerated shark behavior typical of many films. There is little music on the soundtrack, and it was filmed in 4:3 (fullscreen) ratio. As noted above, the real-life events that inspired this story took place in the southern Pacific Ocean, and this film moves the location to the Caribbean.
[edit] Week of the DVD release
Three days after the DVD release of Open Water, filmmakers Chris Kentis, Laura Lau and their seven-year-old daughter, had their own encounter with ocean dangers in what the Associated Press called "a real-life version of their shark thriller Open Water." Kentis stated that the DVD release was "meaningless" in comparison with his nightmarish experience that same week. Vacationing in Thailand, Kentis and his family survived the tsunami that killed 229,866 people. Lau and her daughter were trapped in a second-floor Internet cafe but escaped, as described in an AP story:
Lau, 41, said she pulled about a half-dozen Swedish tourists to safety using a bamboo ladder before using it herself to escape from the cafe's balcony with Sabrina on her back. They reached Kentis by hiking in waist-deep water back to the hotel. The couple then hiked several miles into the mountains with their luggage because they were afraid another massive wave was coming. They took two minicabs to Phuket's east coast, which Kentis said seemed almost unaffected by the tsunami. 'When we got there, it was all people on yachts having a good time. It was just surreal,' Kentis said. 'Two hours later, our kids were swimming in this beautiful hotel pool and we're ordering food.'[1]
[edit] Reception
On a budget recorded by Boxofficemojo.com as $500,000, the film was a spectacular success, grossing $1 million in 47 theaters on its opening weekend and making a total lifetime gross of $54m. [2] The film divided critics, however. While many praised it as an exercise in expertly minimalist filmmaking, some critics found the film difficult to sit through. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert praised the film highly: "Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the 'it's only a movie' reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real." [3], but A. O. Scott in The New York Times lamented that it "succeeds in mobilizing the audience's dread, but it fails to make us care as much as we should about the fate of its heroes." [4]
[edit] Awards
Blanchard Ryan won a Saturn Award for Best Actress (film) in 2004 for her performance.
[edit] Other
Steve Lemme of Broken Lizard makes a cameo as a tourist on the scuba boat.
[edit] References
[edit] See also
- Open Water 2 (2007)
