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The clerk at the video store warned me
about how bad this movie is. “It’s not good. You’ll be disappointed. Everyone else
is,” she promised. But, being an avid fan of anything that has to do with being stranded
in the middle of the ocean, I got the movie anyway.
Open Water is a
suspense thriller based on true events. Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel
Travis) are in desperate need of a relaxing tropical vacation. They spend a nice day
together, walking hand-in-hand on a beach, lying in the sun, shopping for
souvenirs…typical vacation stuff. The next day, they head out on a scuba diving trip for
a forty-minute dive.
Three crewmembers are in charge of the dive,
assisting 22 divers. Unfortunately for Susan and Daniel, though, the group is miscounted
and tallied at 20. When the dive is over, the boat lifts 20 divers out of the water and
heads to shore, leaving Susan and David to tread water in the middle of the
ocean.
To expand on it any more would be to ruin the suspense for you.
But I’ll give
you a hint: sharks.
The clerk at the video store was
wrong in her assessment of Open Water. She told me it was poorly made—almost like
The Blair Witch Project—but I think she was missing the point of the whole film.
To me, the concept of treading water for twenty-four hours in the middle of the ocean,
all day long in the hot sun and all night long in the terrifying dark, surrounded by
circling sharks, is enough of a story to keep me watching. I don’t need much more than
that to stay glued to the screen. Sure, the actors are unknowns, and the movie looks
like it was shot with one camera most of the time. But I was on the edge of my seat
anyway, not knowing what would happen until the very end.
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