How entertaining? ★☆☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 7 August 2011
This a movie review of THE RIG. |
“Look! I don't know what this thing is, but it's not here for food. It likes to kill us and it's doing it... one by one,” Faulkner (Robert Zachar)
Monsters on an oil rig sounds awesome right? Just because something is low budget doesn’t mean it can’t be striking; see Gareth Edwards’ MONSTERS. This stars William Forsythe (ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD). I love the subgenre, from TREMORS to CLOVERFIELD. I guess I’ve given the game away with the above score. THE RIG is nothing like those. It is excruciatingly bad; and not in a VAN HELSING way either, where there is some sort of guilty pleasure. The cinematography is flat, writing woeful and acting worse than a daytime soap opera. The experience reminded me of making films when I was kid. We’re not even in B-movie territory here.
Monsters on an oil rig sounds awesome right? Just because something is low budget doesn’t mean it can’t be striking; see Gareth Edwards’ MONSTERS. This stars William Forsythe (ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD). I love the subgenre, from TREMORS to CLOVERFIELD. I guess I’ve given the game away with the above score. THE RIG is nothing like those. It is excruciatingly bad; and not in a VAN HELSING way either, where there is some sort of guilty pleasure. The cinematography is flat, writing woeful and acting worse than a daytime soap opera. The experience reminded me of making films when I was kid. We’re not even in B-movie territory here.
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Drilling in the ocean seems to have awakened a creature. A severe storm is coming. All non-essential crew are evacuated from the oil rig. A skeleton team are left behind. There is a nod to ALIEN with the company owning the platform being Weyland Drilling. That and the group of working class protagonists are where the similarities end. The organism, someone dressed in a suit that could’ve been out of the original series of ‘Dr Who’, starts picking off the employees. Not much time is wasted, this happens in the first 15 minutes. We are on the opposite end of the scale to massively under-rated THE ABYSS, the sets are laughable and effects cringeworthy. There are perfunctory external shots. Wouldn’t the platform be swaying slightly in such a violent storm? For a downpour that’s meant to last all night, where does it go when they head outside for an extended sequence? There is so little attention to detail, which never lets you enter this world, let alone pull you out of it.
The problem THE RIG has even before it starts, is that it’s automatically compared, fairly or unfairly, with the likes of THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, THE THING, DEEP BLUE SEA, PREDATOR, etc. The production values seem non-existent, and the storytelling lazy. There’s even a flashback of something that occurred four minutes earlier.
“Carey we’re going under the rig,” Bland guy
“I don’t have cameras there,” Carey
“I know,” Bland guy
A bullet-surviving psychotic sea creature with flammable blood had potential, but ended up being a crime against television. The best bit? The behind the scenes extra on the DVD is hilarious. Well, the five minutes I could bring myself to watch was.