REVIEW: Leviathan (George P. Cosmatos, 1989)

Warning.  I have misled you.

This is not a review.  This is a place for me to talk about the ending of the movie Leviathan.  Because the movie leaves me with almost nothing else to talk about.

To talk about Leviathan is to talk about its ending, because its ending is stupendously awful.  It's one of the great miscalculations in film history.  So wrong-headed, tonally misguided, and poorly-executed that it doubles back on the film and ruins every single frame.  Nothing of value has been viewed, because the filmmakers thought none of Leviathan's virtues were valuable enough to preserve - everything that happened prior to the last five minutes retroactively decays into meaningless drivel.  This movie doesn't suck for ninety minutes, and then it sucks for eternity.

Leviathan's initial ninety minutes play like a reasonable twist on the solitude of Alien and The Thing, with blue-collar deep-sea divers struggling to escape an infection that mutates its victims and combines them into a larger, vicious predator.  As the people slowly transform, they lose hair and suffer skin sores, which uncomfortably parallels the effects of diseases like cancer and AIDS (shades of Cronenberg's The Fly).  The number of survivors decrease as the monster's size increases, and only a few escape to the surface.  The three survivors are Beck (Peter Weller), Willie (Amanda Pays), and Jones (Ernie Hudson).

Up to this point, the film's portrayed its horror in a relatively grounded manner, borrowing more from its inspirations than just the exploitative elements.  Beck, Willie, and Jones crest the ocean waves and gasp for breath.  It's a beautiful day.  Music swells.  Beck lights a flare.

A helicopter pilot, evidently looking in the wrong direction, radios in to base.  He's calling it a day.  The music dips down, and an ominous wide shot reminds the viewer that the heroes have traded their deathly restrictive environment for an equally imposing expanse:

This is where the film should end.  The heroes survived, but of course it's a big world, and safety can only ever be temporary.  Think of the film's inspirations.  Alien ended with Ripley giving a final tragic report on the casualties of the Nostromo.  The Thing ended with two survivors uncertain of the other, destined to freeze with their guns forever pointed at each other.  The endings are ruminative.  They examine the costs of the story.  They treat their premises with respect.  If Leviathan ended with the heroes treading water uncertainly, it might've succeeded as an honorable knockoff.  Maybe the three divers could offer a few more uncertain lines, and the camera could settle on a waning sun, but this is fundamentally correct.

Instead, the film re-uses the footage of Beck shooting the flare, and of course the helicopter pilot sees them, because of course he sees them.

Of course he does.

And then there's an arbitrary shark attack that involves no actual attacking.

And the monster returns just in time to kill the black guy.

And Beck twists a grenade, shoots off a one-liner ("Say hi, motherfucker!"), and throws the grenade in the monster's mouth.

And upon rescue, Beck punches the corporate villainess square in the face and grins, because the agony of watching friends die and become a monstrosity can be emotionally resolved with a single punch to the mouth.

The obvious explanation for this awful ending is that upon review, people higher on the corporate totem pole found the ending too quiet and tried to spice it up with some last-minute high-action and a conclusion that involved the hero and villainess (Meg Foster) meeting face to face (up to then, she's only been glimpsed on video).  There's no evidence outside the film to suggest this, but the film itself explains what happened.

The shark sequence was clearly shot much later, because the rubber fins arrive suddenly in a medium shot, and because the actual footage of sharks has no spatial connection and, more importantly, no consequence to what's happening on the surface.  The sharks just swim by and leave.  The re-used shot with Beck's flare suggests a last-minute fix in the editing room to accommodate the new footage.  Beck's out-of-character one-liner and grenade-toss are clearly stolen from Jaws, but all it does is remind the viewer that there's a much better ocean-monster movie out there. The monster's explosion is so poorly edited that it has time for two reaction shots, including one that happens after it explodes.

The whole thing became a sick joke, except I didn't laugh.  I couldn't.  Maybe other people will.  Nothing wrong with laughing at trashy horror movies.  The problem is that this is not a trashy horror film.  Or at least, it wasn't.  Not until the ending.  Which switched the film's status from a mature homage to previous trend-setters movies into botched, brain-dead plagiarism.  The problem is, now that I've seen Leviathan all the way through, my mind can't make room for the homage.  All I can think about is how bad the movie is.  It didn't always suck, but now it does, and it always will.  What a goddamn shame that is.

RATING: D