Below

With the absence of a steady supply of John Carpenter films in the late 1990s and beyond, David Twohy stepped up and began making unabashed genre films in the Carpenter spirit with The Arrival (1996), a paranoid thriller cum the aliens are among us a la They Live (1988). Twohy followed this up with Pitch Black (2000) featuring an anti-hero very much in the same vein as Snake Plissken in Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), which makes his bloated sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), his Escape from L.A. (1996). To continue this analogy, Below (2002) is Twohy’s variation on The Fog (1980) albeit fused with Das Boot (1981) – a spooky ghost story set on an American submarine during World War II. Like Carpenter, Twohy populates his films with outsiders that fight against overwhelming odds or a group of people that must put aside their differences and work as a team against a common threat. Below definitely falls into the latter category as a crew of seamen investigate the mysterious events transpiring aboard their sub.

Right from the get-go, Twohy establishes a beautiful style of economical storytelling by showing a WWII bomber, short on fuel, spotting survivors in the Atlantic Ocean and delivering them a message that they’ll send help. Sure enough, the USS Tiger Shark, an attack submarine, shows up and rescues two British men and a woman while a German warship off in the distance is bearing down on their position. Lieutenant Brice (Bruce Greenwood) orders the sub to dive and hopes that they weren’t spotted.

One of the survivors is gravely injured and the woman – Claire (Olivia Williams) – informs Ensign Odell (Matthew Davis) that they were aboard a hospital ship that was attacked two days ago. To make matters worse, the other man, known as Kingsley (Dexter Fletcher), claims he saw a U-Boat before their ship went down. Something doesn’t seem quite right about the survivors. Maybe it is the clandestine conversation between Claire and the wounded man or the gaps in her story. As the journey progresses, other strange things begin to happen, which suggest the possibility of supernatural activity that may have something to do with a secret that Brice shares between his two officers – Lieutenant Coors (Scott Foley) and Lieutenant Loomis (Holt McCallany). Already on edge, thanks to the threat of the German warship, these unsettling, unexplained occurrences spook the crew something fierce.

Twohy does a fantastic job of ratcheting up the tension when the sub tries to avoid an advancing enemy warship. The crew are instructed to be as quiet as possible because of how sound travels and the deafening silence is soon interrupted by a Benny Goodman tune suddenly playing on a record player at ear-splitting volume. Was this an act of sabotage, as the crew suspects, which is intensified when they find out that the wounded man is in fact a German. As expected, all hell breaks loose. After enduring a barrage of depth charges, one bumps and scrapes along the sub’s hull without exploding and we are white knuckling it right along with the crew.

Twohy effectively uses the claustrophobic confirms of the sub to maximum effect with the atmospheric sounds of being underwater adding to the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night vibe. Every clank and groan can be explained away as the typical sounds of a being in a sub but it is nonetheless creepy. The director enhances the soundscape by enshrouding rooms and hallways in shadow or bathing them in hellish red light. He also teases us with quick glimpses of dead bodies or something else out there in the water.

Bruce Greenwood leads a solid cast of character actors. Ever the reliable thespian, he does an excellent job of portraying a commanding officer gradually unraveling as the stress of captaining a sub under trying conditions gets to him. Greenwood has the gravitas to play a believable leader of men while also using his expressive face and eyes to suggest buried guilt that threatens to surface under the stress of the situation. He’s supported by the likes of television mainstays Scott Foley and Holt McCallany as his fellow officers, the sympathetic Matt Davis as the rookie ensign that suspects something’s not right with Brice, and Olivia Williams as the persuasive doctor not afraid to stand-up to Brice. Rounding things out are Zach Galifianakis in a rare straight man role, Jason Flemyng as one of the superstitious and increasingly twitchy crew members, and Dexter Fletcher as the other Brit survivor who, alas, gets little to do.

Below received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “In its best moments it can evoke fear, and it does a good job of evoking the claustrophobic terror of a little World War II boat, but the story line is so eager to supply frightening possibilities that sometimes we feel jerked around.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “The cool thing about this B-plus-quality B movie … is that nothing is certain, and every camera shot looks good. (Everything sounds good, too: Twohy understands the power of aural mystery – the whispery sound, for example, of seaweed brushing a sub's hull.) The downside is that nothing is clear, either. Dramatic murk is the condition Twohy likes best, and sometimes Below drifts into confusion.”

In his review for The New York Times, Dave Kehr wrote, “this is a film of great technical precision, in which every shot has been thoughtfully selected for maximum expressiveness and the crisp, creative editing propels the story along. Below may not mark Mr. Twohy's emergence into the mainstream, but his promise remains undiminished.” The Los Angeles Times’ Manohla Dargis wrote, “If Below had been released in 1943—the year of its story—it would have come in at an agile 70 minutes instead of a protracted 104. Twohy has said he studied the work of Jacques Tourneur, the director of sleek 1940s thrillers such as Cat People. You can see Tourneur's imprint on Below, which makes better use of shadow than most neo-noirs.” In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Guthmann wrote, “Twohy's overwrought, comic-book theatrics work against him, as does the hokey script that he, Lucas Sussman and director Darren Aronofsky all fiddled with.”

Below is a fantastic fusion of WWII sub movie and ghost story, pitting forceful personalities against each other with Claire and Brice at the center of the conflict. He’s hiding something and she’s trying to uncover it. The attention to period detail is well done without being too showy but is evident in the little things, like how the crew speaks to each other both in sub lingo and period jargon. Much like Carpenter ensemble films such as The Fog or Prince of Darkness (1987), Below has no clearly defined lead protagonist, opting instead to spread the screen-time around, using the confined space of the sub as another character. The real test of the lasting power of this film is that it holds up to repeated viewings even after you know what the plot twist is and that’s because of Twohy’s efficient direction, the well-written screenplay (by Lucas Sussman, Darren Aronofsky and Twohy), and the wonderful performances of the entire cast. Like most ghost stories, the one featured in Below hinges on guilty and how the sins of the past literally come back to haunt those responsible.

Beach Red

In his book of collected film criticism, Ghosts in the Machine, Michael Atkinson makes a convincing argument that actor/director Cornel Wilde is more of a maverick filmmaker than the much more celebrated Sam Fuller. To be fair, Wilde has far fewer directorial efforts than Fuller – only nine – but each one attempts to push the boundaries of genre and audience expectations. This is certainly true of Beach Red (1967), an adaptation of Peter Bowman’s 1945 novella of the same name, which is a visceral, unsentimental look a group of United States Marines that land on an unnamed Japanese fortified island in the Pacific during World War II. The film features the occasional surreal imagery that anticipates Apocalypse Now (1979), harrowing battle scenes that likely inspired the ones in Saving Private Ryan (1998), and voiceover narration of various soldiers’ thoughts coupled with flashbacks of their lives back home done years before Terrence Malick would do the same in The Thin Red Line (1998).

To wit, the film’s first image is that of a jungle a split second before it is blown up – one that Francis Ford Coppola would steal outright and use for even more dramatic effect in the aforementioned Apocalypse Now. The opening credits play over paintings of battle scenes depicting Japanese and American pastoral settings while Jean Wallace (Wilde's wife) sings the mournful title song, establishing the anti-war stance this film takes.

In an audacious move, the last painting morphs into the first scene as we meet the tough-talking Marines en route to a Japanese island. They gripe amongst each other while Captain MacDonald (Cornel Wilde) looks over his men and shares his thoughts about war via voiceover narration, anticipating a similar technique employed by Malick in his own World War II epic. However, Wilde is not the thoughtful philosopher Malick is and MacDonald’s musings definitely skew closer to the no-nonsense prose of Sam Fuller. We also get the inner thoughts of soldiers scared of dying, which is quite effective as they sit in a boat headed for the island and an uncertain fate.

The beach landing is rendered in brutal fashion as men are shot and killed before they reach the beach. Wilde does an excellent job of giving a sense of scale with long shots of hundreds of men wading through the water while explosions go off around them and bullets whiz by dangerously. He doesn’t shy away from the horrors as soldiers wade past severed limbs and a young man, paralyzed by fear, gets an arm blown off by mortar fire in a scene later recycled in Saving Private Ryan. There is a refreshing lack of sentimentality as Wilde grimly depicts the brutality of war and arbitrary nature of death. Why do some men die while others are spared? Beach Red suggests that is random and many survive by sheer luck.

While Wilde and co-star Rip Torn get significant screen-time, no one character is fully developed – the filmmaker has bigger fish to fry. He’s more interested in depicting the horrors of war in unflinching detail. The refusal to focus on one or two characters puts the viewer off balance because they don’t know who to identify with and this adds to the unpredictable nature of Beach Red.

Wilde also gives significant screen-time to the Japanese, showing one of its commanders thinking about his wife and life at home. He also shows some of their devious tactics, like putting a decoy up in a tree for the Marines to shoot at and then kill them, or Japanese soldiers dressing up like American ones in order to get close enough to kill them. He also attempts to humanize the Japanese by presenting a scene where we see foot soldiers getting ready for the advancing Marines and they joke and talk amongst themselves – one guy even sketches a flower to the pass the time. This prevents them from being rendered as merely anonymous monsters.

Wilde employs all sorts of ballsy techniques for the time, like briefly adopting a first person point-of-view of a Marine making his way through tall grass en route to stopping a Japanese machine gun nest. The filmmaker also uses freeze frames to capture a soldier’s fear of stabbing himself with his own bayonet in jarringly effective fashion. In another scene, MacDonald’s flashback about his wife back home is rendered via a montage of still images while she laughs about something, which is followed by footage of her embracing him as she gets upset that he is going to war. These broad strokes succinctly show what’s at stake for him. Wilde doesn’t telegraph these techniques but rather crudely inserts them for maximum effect. The unconventional way he uses these techniques keeps us constantly on edge and adds to the unpredictable nature of the film.

It is interesting to note that Beach Red came out when the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War was heating up and one can’t help but wonder if Wilde meant his film to be a warning, of sorts, about the brutality of such conflict. This is particularly apparent when the Marines make their way through dense jungle not unlike the ones in ‘Nam.

For a film made in the late 1960s, the depiction of violence is surprisingly graphic, anticipating Sam Peckinpah’s orgy of carnage in The Wild Bunch (1969). Beach Red certainly lives up to its name as men have limbs blown off, are shot in the neck, are brutally stabbed, and have arms broken with sickening snaps. Wilde’s lack of polish as a filmmaker actually works in the film’s favor as it reinforces the visceral depiction of war in a way that more sophisticated films do not. He manages to eschew the two-fisted heroics of some of Fuller’s war films in favor of gritty realism mixed with experimental techniques. Beach Red doesn’t really say anything new about war but does find new ways of depicting its hellish nature.