Leviathan

Thanks in part to the success of James Cameron’s “The Abyss” (1989), the late 1980s and early ’90s brought a tidal wave of undersea movies, mostly along the lines of sci-fi horror pieces with second-rate screenplays and extremely tight budgets.

“Leviathan” represents one of the few exceptions to that trend, due in part to Cosmatos’s vigorous direction which successfully imbues the story with exciting pacing and a decent dose of suspense, and then there’s the fact that he had a decidedly larger budget at his disposal than that of average B movies of the era (“Filmauro”, the film production company founded by Luigi and Aurelio De Laurentiis, invested close to 20 million dollars).

The film’s major drawback is its purely derivative nature: if you take into account everything it more or less explicitly “borrows” from great genre classics such as “Alien” (1979) and “The Thing” (1982), its originality quotient drops to approximately zero.

A fine cast: in addition to the always superlative Peter Weller, we get a thoughtful Richard Crenna and an athletic Amanda Pays (not to mention the typically icy Meg Foster in a small role).