Stephen Sommers may have dropped off the face of the planet, but the filmmaker’s legacy has long since been secured thanks entirely to his status as the director of 1999’s generation-defining The Mummy, but that doesn’t mean you should be sleeping on Deep Rising.
Before he became Hollywood’s go-to guy for over-pixelated blockbusters stuffed to bursting point with excess, he made a mark as the mastermind behind an over-pixelated R-rated creature feature stuffed to bursting point with excess, and it’s no surprise the movie went on to become a firm cult favorite.
A crack team of thieves find the job of a lifetime going awry when the ship they planned to hijack is discovered empty bar the presence of a rampaging multi-tentacled beast, but in a recent video for Insider, cruise ship expert Wendy Williams shared an entirely different set of criticisms.
“Radios, there are so many backups, and if the radios didn’t work, you have satellite phones, all sorts of different types of satellite communication. To be able to scramble a ship like that, no. There’s a lot of people on the bridge. I’m not sure what they’re all doing. This particular cruise ship is equipped with sonar, which, I don’t know why you would even need that. You wouldn’t. So, everything is scrambled except for the sonar that’s picking up some, I guess it’s a sea monster in this one.
Even though in this particular movie clip, they’re dealing with a sea monster, not to put whales or large mammals into a category of being sea monsters, very unfortunately, there are whale strikes. Cruise ships pay a lot of attention to give a large leave distance and to avoid whales at all costs. Believability from that bridge scene, probably zero.”
Just like that, the immersion of Deep Rising has been ruined in an instant. Now that we know how inaccurately it depicts the bridge of a cruise liner, just how are we supposed to get invested in a hungry sea creature with teeth for days making mincemeat of the characters knowing how far-fetched it is from the start?