Needs more monster
Everybody seems to call this movie an Alien ripoff; have these people never seen The Thing?
Second out of the gate in 1989's underwater-thriller bonanza, this movie certainly improves upon Deep Star Six's production values but isn't as much fun. A deep-sea mining team happens across a sunken Russian submarine, and one crew member brings a safe on board. They bust it open and find...vodka! Then one of them drinks that vodka, appears to die, and enter Stan Winston.
Leviathan suffers from a number of problems, not the least of which being that it takes a long, long time for things to get slimy. Once things do, it's fun (I love that scene where Ernie Hudson, not knowing that the guy under the sheets he's talking to is supposed to be dead, sees the legs move), though not too distinguished. And on the way there, it's just too easy to see where things are going. Comparisons to The Thing get increasingly hard to avoid; one well-meaning guy cuts off all possible escape for the good of humanity, there are shenanigans with the blood supply, people explode into nasty monsters with mouths turning up in odd places.
Like the Thing, this fish-mutant creature (the title of the movie refers to the name of that submarine, though of course the sea-monster reference shouldn't be overlooked) seems to be able to regenerate itself from even the smallest piece of itself. After all, it lay dormant in a flask for a while. And since it seems designed for sea life, I don't see how the plan to blast it out the airlock does humanity any good. Not only would it survive that, but every last cell would have to be destroyed to kill this thing off, and...I don't want to give away the ending, but lemme tell you, there are still lots and lots of cells.
It's pretty easy to see who's gonna survive this one and who won't, though, gee, d'ya think it'll be the star, and the hot chick who seems more "deep" than the other hot chick? Okay, so as a shooting gallery, you know exactly who's going down, but while they're on screen, some of the actors make good impressions, particularly Hector Elizondo, one of those actors I just seem to like in anything he's in, no matter how crappy it is. Unfortunately, the characters mostly seem to have one piece of schtick (the lecher, the token black, the Puerto Rican who wants to move up in the world) and aren't expanded beyond that. Peter Weller is his usual wooden self as everybody's boss, and Richard Crenna's character has a past that's way more interesting than his present.
Still, director George Pan Cosmatos (who's directed a whole lotta crap in his day) plays it all pretty straight (except for that silly crowd-pleaser ending), and you get to see Amanda Pays in her underwear, twice! There are a lot of things to like about this movie; Jerry Goldsmith recycles his score from Alien (which in turn was partly cannibalized from earlier works), which isn't very original but it is effective. The production design both inside the station and underwater is all excellent.
The same cannot be said about the monster, however; not exactly a Stan Winston classic here, we don't really see much of the creature, and I don't mean that in a good "you get to use your imagination" way. The overall impression is of Stan standing offscreen, shaking a tentacle in front of the camera.
Leviathan is an enjoyable time-killer while you're doing everything short of stabbing yourself in the knee to distract from the agony coming from your left tonsil, but not much more. Story and co-writing credits (with Jeb Stuart) go to David Peoples (Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys), further demonstrating that in order for him to write a great script, he needs great source material to adapt. For this kind of thing, Deep Star Six might not be as expensively made, but it's quite a bit more consistently fun.
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