Leviathan Movie Review

Leviathan (1989)

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Written by: David Webb Peoples (story), David Webb Peoples and Jeb Stuart (screenplay)
Directed by: George P. Cosmatos
Starring: Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays, Daniel Stern, Ernie Hudson, Hector Elizondo
Rated: R
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Plot
Perched on the hull of a wrecked Soviet freighter, a team of deep-sea miners led by head oceanographer Steven Beck comes face to face with a mutant creature that's the product of a failed genetic experiment.

Verdict
It takes concepts from sci-fi and horror movies of the 80s and waters them down. It's derivative to a fault. The idea behind this movie had to be a producer saw Alien and The Thing and wanted to capitalize on that success with a cookie cutter film. This movie makes you want to watch the superior movies that inspired it. There's nothing new or interesting here.
Skip it.

Review
The setup is an underwater mining mission. This jumps into the drama quickly with one of the crew having an oxygen and pressure issue in the suit while in the water just to illustrate how dangerous ocean floor mining can be. It's a bit over-dramatic.

This feels like Alien underwater with the monster from The Thing. This is inferior to both of those movies, but those have to be the inspiration as this follows a bit too closely. This crew finds a Russian ship, but there's no record of it. The ship's jerk develops a medical issue which kicks off the main plot as the crew realizes and then must survive a monster from that ship. Daniel Stern plays the jerk, and I'm sure it's no coincidence he's the one that gets stick. Either due to his many later comedic roles or how his character lacks any subtlety, his crude jerk act seems like some kind of skit.

Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays, Peter Weller, Daniel Stern, Ernie Hudson, Hector Elizondo

This devolves to the crew on the run defending themselves, but it's just boring. I've seen this plot before, and I've seen it done better. Nothing in this movie is new or interesting. Alien did a good job of developing characters and driving tension with the beeping trackers. This movie does nothing like that. It's just attack after attack. This had so much potential, but the script doesn't know how to drive tension. It's not that different from a budget slasher horror movie where the plot becomes mindless attacks.

The final scene is this movie is odd. It's the characters that have escaped, but it feels like it was either tacked on or all of the good footage was destroyed and this is all they had left. It's almost comical.