Some Thoughts On Submerged

Quick show of hands: how many of you were aware that there is a new movie starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney out on Apple TV right now? It's your bog-standard hitman buddy comedy -- it's not bad, per se, but it very much feels like something my parents would have seen on a date night at the theater in 1996 and forgotten about the following week. Or a new comedy starring Vince Vaughn? Or a critically panned series with Cate Blanchett and Sasha Baron-Cohen?

Apple TV's strategy seems to be: hire the biggest and most expensive stars out there, put them in content that is mid, and don't tell anyone. And it's no wonder that Apple's first "film" for the Vision Pro follows the same model. Submerged got a big name director (Edward Berger, director of the Academy Award-winning All Quiet on the Western Front) and spared no expense on production (it was shot on location in Prague, Brussels, and Malta over three weeks, Submerged was filmed using a full-scale 23-ton submarine set made with real steel, brass, and metal that was modeled after WWII-era vessels).

But the result feels less like a movie and more like a series of camera tests. The story, so far as it goes, is about a group of young men on a submarine in World War II, but none of them get any sort of backstory or personality except for the guy who does the absolute most cliche thing possible, pulling a photo of his little sister out of his pocket and talking about how he can't wait to see her when he gets home.

Basically, there's a destroyer overhead, then there's a leak, and then everyone escapes. The action, once it starts, is pretty good, some of the shots of the rising water are legitimately scary and thrilling. But the constant perspective shifting and the fact that the character never acknowledges the viewer destroys a lot of the immersion. As someone who watches a lot of 360 video I kept looking around and being caught off guard by the 180 view, but that's just me.

There is so much that can be done with spatial video in terms of seeing a first person perspective and feeling like the characters are speaking directly to you, but none of it is present in this movie. It looks great, and it cost a lot, but in the end it just falls flat.