Leviathan (1989)
The plot: Set sometime in the near future, we follow a crew of eight on the last few days of their stint working for a deep-sea silver mining operation off the coast of Florida. On the ocean floor, one of the crew members stumbles upon the wreck of a mysterious Russian ship, “Leviathan,” which has sunk and perhaps was ambushed by their navy. They loot some cargo on board the ship and in so doing, they inadvertently bring back the remnants of a genetic experiment gone awry. Now something dangerous has been set loose upon the underwater abode that is killing them in gruesome and nightmarish ways.
Shortly after completing the screenplay to Blade Runner, David Webb Peoples began to write the screenplay to Leviathan. His original script differed from the end result in significant ways. Peoples envisioned that the film would be very dark aesthetically, with no natural light because the characters were at the bottom of the ocean where sunlight doesn’t penetrate. Their suits would give their faces some light but everything around them would be pitch dark, just as it would be 10,000 feet below sea level. In the story, the characters open a bottle with dried-up insects in it that come to life and escape to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting crew. These creatures were not a big monster – more like parasites that get into humans in fatal ways.
When James Cameron announced after Aliens that his next feature film would be a big-budget epic underwater adventure, many film producers began to scramble to put together underwater terror properties that could ride on the anticipation for what would become The Abyss. Peoples’ script was one such script, bought out by Die Hard producers Lawrence and Charles Gordon, for the Gordon Company, hoping they could tap into this anticipation.
In 1987, the Gordon Company shopped their project around, eventually landing at Dino de Laurentiis’ company, the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. DEG was in dire straits financially and only looking for sure things. A dark horror-thriller that took place underwater that would ride the hype they felt would exist for The Abyss seemed a viable option. DEG picked up Leviathan from the Gordon Company and began the process of developing it as a commercial property.
DEG’s first task was to corral an experienced director. Dino assigned the task to Rambo: First Blood Part II‘s George P. Cosmatos, who was pulled from his costly DEG production called China Marines, which DEG subsequently canceled. When De Laurentiis told Cosmatos the storyline, the director welcomed the move because there were no guns at all in the story. Cosmatos didn’t want to be pigeonholed into doing explosive action films for the rest of his life after Rambo II and Cobra.
After reading the script, Cosmatos brought in David Webb Peoples to request major changes to his original script. Cosmatos wanted the story to conform to Cameron’s prior film, Aliens. Peoples tried to make it work but found the changes Cosmatos wanted to be unreasonable, so he abandoned the project. To make things work to Cosmatos’s satisfaction, the Gordons brought in Die Hard co-writer Jeb Stuart to overhaul the Peoples script.
For many years, Peoples disowned Leviathan and refused to watch it. One day, many years later, curiosity got the better of him and he gave it a go. In watching the film for the first time, he came to the conclusion that his original Leviathan premise was problematic and could see that he made mistakes in his storytelling. But, he also said the filmmakers compounded the problems by adopting his mistakes and then adding mistakes of their own. Given the result was a substandard film that failed critically and financially, Peoples says that he is not proud of having his name on Leviathan.
However, DEG’s financial difficulties finally got the better of them and they had to abandon Leviathan shortly after developing the Stuart-revised script. Father Luigi de Laurentiis and his son Aurelio, the older brother and nephew of Dino, wanted to take it up for their production company, Filmauro, but lacked the funds. To keep the film in family hands, DEG helped Filmauro to acquire the rights and financed it in exchange for international distribution rights.
Leviathan marks Cosmatos’s first film done in Italy since 1976’s Cassandra Crossing, shot primarily in Cinecitta, the largest film studio in Europe. Additional shooting would also be done in Malta because they had some very large water tanks, approximately the size of fifty swimming pools. The tanks allowed for tightly controlled underwater shooting, while additional exterior ocean shots would be filmed near Cancun, Mexico. Filmauro hit turbulence early on at Cinecitta after signing an agreement with the crew’s union to extend their workdays to include Saturdays. Many of the union members felt this was not negotiated with their consent and decided to go on strike, effectively shutting down all filmmaking in Italy. Within a week, an agreement was reached to satisfy all parties.
Other than the strike, early publicity on the film was kept to a minimum, likely to avoid competitors speeding up their productions to get into theaters first. The labyrinthian set remained closed to the press and public for the first two months of production, only opening up in the last couple of weeks of the shoot. Once the press was allowed in, Cosmatos confessed that Leviathan was the most difficult film he’d ever made and that there were times when he felt he would crack from the pressure.
The main difficulty for Cosmatos was his constant tug of war with his visual effects crew. The crew was Stan Winston Studio, who had much clout in the industry, effectively able to pick their projects. In fact, Stan Winston was sought by both the makers of Leviathan as well as Cameron for The Abyss. Winston would have preferred working with Cameron again, having done The Terminator and Aliens, but he had a personal conflict. After completing Pumpkinhead he wanted more opportunities to direct. He chose Leviathan because 0Cosmatos offered Winston to take over second unit director duties and the film was scheduled to finish production much sooner, allowing him the opportunity to direct another project he was offered, A Gnome Named Gnorm.
Trying to envision what life might be like for humans living at the bottom of the deep sea requires much forethought. Winston worked closely with Cosmatos in looking at a collection of pictures depicting deep-sea fish life and books on anatomy, drawing up several dozen mockups for what they felt should be the look of their main creature, eventually combining many of those mockups into a unified idea of a hybridized monster. As Winston also did effects work for Alien and Aliens, he wanted to stray from copycatting, but Cosmatos thought he should get as close as possible with what worked. Cosmatos often argued about the look of Winston’s creations, bickering constantly in front of the cast and crew. Winston and his staff were surprised by how little of their meticulous work was represented on the screen, mostly limiting their creature to small glimpses, even though they put a great deal of effort into sculpting the look and choreographing the movements.
Ron Cobb provides production design, as he did so effectively as an art designer for Alien. Cobb found Cosmatos too overbearing to work for, especially in his insistence that the film follows the formula of Alien, and left the project during in the late pre-production phase in favor of James Cameron’s The Abyss. Bill Skinner picked up where Cobb left off, but they followed Cobb’s designs as much as possible such that he still received credit for the production design.
Sets were enclosed and claustrophobic, with everyone not seeing daylight most of the time, which made it hard for a cast and crew to shoot within the longterm. Boredom would sometimes overtake the actors, who had a great deal of time having to sit around waiting for the sets or effects team to set things up. The Italian film crew made it challenging for Winston to convey precise instructions, often requiring the effects team to have to draw pictures of what they wanted to get their needs across. The Italians also loved to have copious amounts of red wine with their meals, and occasionally got the Hollywood crew to join in, which tended to make for a sometimes unproductive time on the set. The shoot was also contained to a tight six weeks, which, when things seemed to be falling behind, caused continuous re-arranging of the schedule to the point where few knew what they would be working on from day to day.
The Winston Studios dive suits designed by Steve Burg were a constant source for consternation. The actors complained about due to the persistent and prolonged discomfort. The suits were extremely difficult to get on and off so the actors would have to stay in these bulky and heavy suits for hours with limited movement. They would frequently overheat in the suit so they would pump in cold air between takes. They couldn’t use their hands to hold things so they would have to be spoon-fed when they needed to eat or drink while in the suits.
There wasn’t much of a stunt budget so the actors were asked to perform many of their own stunts, including some involving being in water or around fire effects. Hector Elizondo said he came close to losing his life when a technician pressed the wrong button and the hydraulic attached above the head of his dive suit he was wearing started to crush him. Luckily, they figured out the issue in the nick of time. Amanda Pays stated that the physical demands were so difficult that if they ever made a Leviathan II, they’d have to pay her a fortune to return.
The optical effects supervisor, Barry Nolan, had experience simulating underwater action using lighting, smoke, and floating things in the air to simulate being submerged on the ocean floor Actors in this deep-sea suits did not have to perform underwater due to a clever dry-for-wet system where they are suspended on wires to mimic the buoyancy of underwater movement, while lighting is used to make the environs seem like the blue ocean (though it should be pitch black at that depth), while the air was blown in to kick up cut-up feathers to simulate plankton and other little things floating around them. This allowed them to shoot in and around the massive wreck of the Leviathan without needing to build a gargantuan tank at great expense just for a one-off movie.
It also allowed them to avoid expensive dive equipment and laborious scuba instruction for the cast and crew in favor of fiberglass mock-up suits, made with football padding underneath and helmets bought from the 1984 film, 2010. To get the feeling of the weight buoyancy of being at the bottom of the ocean, the dry-for-wet sequences were shot at 48fps, giving the appearance of slow movements when played at the standard 24fps.
However, they found that the feathers meant resemble plankton tended to drop straight down rather than swirl in the air and covered the sand on the ground. Nick Allder, who won an Academy Award for his work on Alien, came up with an alternate solution involving ‘candelotti’ fireworks originally produced for cooking while camping. This process had also been used by Italian filmmakers for years to simulate snow, utilizing slow-burning candles wrapped in paper and solid alcohol. Blowing out the smoldering flame produces fine white ash flakes that will float in the air for several minutes and swirl around when someone moves past, eventually evaporating when it hits the floor. Two-hundred pounds of sand was shipped in from an Italian beach for the shoot. Bellows were put into the feet of the suit so that when the actors stepped down it would puff up sand, just as if they were on the bottom of the ocean.
Leviathan isn’t much more than an Alien clone, with dashes of John Carpenter’s The Thing, mixed with a recurring Pepsi commercial (product placement for the soft drink is off the charts), substituting the deep sea for space and genetic experimentation for alien infestation. We have the same motley crew of company men and women, the same gory bodily manifestations, the same isolated, labyrinthine set design, the same hybridized ‘monster,’ and the same underlying anti-corporation commentary,
Even with emulating the formula of better films and getting the jump on The Abyss, Leviathan was a box office failure at the time of its release. It earned only $15 million of its $25 million budget back in the US. Part of this might be attributed to being beaten to the punch by DeepStar Six, and lost in anticipation of the higher-profile James Cameron film, The Abyss. It was also too disgusting for most mainstream audiences. Grotesque body transformations, wounds that open up to reveal sharp and gnarly fangs, and a monster that consists of the torsos, limbs, and faces of the victims it fuses with all add up to one of the least appealing science fiction horror films around, visually, for anyone turned off by body horror.
The direction by George P. Cosmatos shows poor instincts with this kind of material. Cosmatos would often admit that he wasn’t sure what he was doing, especially when it came to the technical side of filmmaking. Even with his arguments on making sure they followed the path of Alien, he let the effects and production teams do their thing with a degree of increased autonomy on how to achieve that end. Instead of trying to play for a genuinely frightening motion picture, he’d rather play up half-hearted camp and barf-inducing ick factor to get over the story and character issues.
That motley cast of characters is rife with stereotypes, and at no time exhibit the kind of camaraderie you’d expect from a tight-knit crew who’ve been living in close quarters with only each other to talk to for about 12 weeks. Not that we could expect decent performances when given such horrendous, half-jokey lines to spew in the middle of what’s supposed to be a dark, sinister, gory excursion, but none of them strike a resonant chord throughout, with the possible exception of an underutilized Hector Elizondo.
Ernie Hudson delivers a barrage of one-liners during times of abject horror, shattering the film’s morbid tone time and again, including near the end when he quips about what a bad day he’s having. Hudson joined the cast because he didn’t have to audition he wanted to bring his family to see Rome and Malta, much like an extended vacation. As Hudson was not a swimmer, his scenes merely show him getting out of the water. Hudson thinks that part of why it was not a film well regarded by the public ties in with his character’s demise at the climax, which was completely unnecessary in his opinion. Cosmatos felt they needed a surprise, but by that point, Hudson felt it was a cliche that the black character wouldn’t make it through, especially by a random shark in the area, and that it would have been a much more surprising if he survived.
Meanwhile, Daniel Stern plays the most loathsome comic character of them all, as the beyond-belief pervert Sixpack (why the name? Never explained, but no one calls him anything else — the corporation prints that nickname on his diving suit!), who would have been fired from just about any job for the kind of sexual harassment he perpetuates every single second he’s in the room with any woman. And poor Amanda Pays, aka Mrs. Corbin Bernsen, has to disrobe to her undergarments several times for no other reason than for pure audience titillation. Peter Weller worked with Cosmatos before in Of Unknown Origin. Cosmatos wanted Weller because he was the strongest actor he’d worked with, other than Richard Crenna, who Cosmatos also cast. Weller can play a very convincing oddball but does not fit at all as the steely, charismatic chief who is supposed to represent the rational hero, wisecracking instead of emoting at the tensest of moments.
The only thing I remember about the movie from when I had seen it shortly after its initial release on home video is that a friend and I used to refer to the sickly feeling we had after eating bad food as, “The Leviathan Feeling.” I couldn’t remember if that reference had been due to horrific nausea shared among the film’s characters who were mutating internally, or if it had been the nauseous result of actually watching a movie we found disgusting. I can tell you on this long-in-coming rewatch that the answer works for both.
The film’s climax and the ending are the worst aspects. The final half-hour features absurd developments that ignore such primary dangers as oxygen deprivation and decompression sickness, and even tosses in a shark attack to up the ante, as if escaping a massive, vomitous man/fish monstrosity that could potentially infect and wipe out the human race if it were to surface weren’t formidable or scary enough. A jump shot with an explosive, a one-liner that rips off Jaws, and a literal “punch line” at the end of the movie are just one more kick to the gut for those few movie fans left who manage to endure what is little more than a rotting dish of cinematic salmagundi. Like its main monster, Leviathan is a repulsive, mongrelized fusing of the bodies of work of several other, far more appealing entities, as hard to look at from a visual standpoint as it is hard to stomach in its actions.
Qwipster’s rating: D
MPAA Rated: R for strong creature violence, terror, disturbing images, and language, including some sexual references and brief nudity.
Running Time: 98 min.
Cast: Peter Weller, Amanda Pays, Ernie Hudson, Richard Crenna, Hector Elizondo, Daniel Stern, Meg Foster, Michael Carmine, Lisa Eilbacher
Director: George P. Cosmatos
Screenplay: David Webb Peoples, Jeb Stuart