The Rig Review

• 29th Jul 2011

Ah haaa! Yes indeed! Time for some honest-to-goodness, low-down dirty, no budget, seen-it-all-before horror fluff.

While there is a chance (a very slim one), that The Rig could be bringing some clever new twists on a familiar format for us to get our teeth in to, I somehow have my doubts, and upon initial inspection I’m not holding my breath waiting for it.

The Rig…….

Hmmm… not the most promising of titles, but hey! They said that about Star Wars and Alien so perhaps we’ll cut the movie some slack for a moment and see what happens.

Ah, ok so the ‘rig’ in question is an oil drilling platform (no prizes there), and seems to be run by a company called [Weyland Drilling] whose [W] logo is very reminiscent of the Weyland/Yutani logo in the Alien franchise. I guess this is an intentional reference, and rather sets up an expectation that a movie like this has no chance of living up to.

Moving on, there’s a definite playbook which movies at the shallow end of the trough (and the not so shallow end, for that matter) seem to follow quite a lot. Part of the deal seems to be to rehash, regurgitate and reuse ideas, themes, dynamics, relationships and character types from established, successful movies of the past. This liberal borrowing (either subtle or blatant) often extends to the wholesale lifting of scene set-ups, and shots too. I remember noticing how many of Ridley Scott’s Alien setups were shamelessly ‘borrowed’ and applied effectively in Event Horizon years ago, and that was a much much bigger movie than The Rig in terms of production budget.

So let’s just get this out of the way before we carry on: The Rig is a classic ‘trapped in a house with a monster on the loose’ yarn. It’s textbook, and despite my initial hopes to the contrary, it offers no variation or original thinking on the format. In a nutshell, there’s a deep sea drilling rig (the rig), that accidentally drills into some kind of fissure and releases ‘something’ (we don’t at first see much of it, a la Alien, but turns out it’s a sort of scaly, bi-pedal monster/Angler Fish/manlike thing), which inexplicably finds its way up on to the platform and begins slaughtering the skeleton crew still aboard, who are riding out a severe night time storm.

All the most common checkpoints are present:

• the action takes place in a closed system i.e. an environment that the human protagonists can’t escape from easily
• Ccmmunications with the outside world have been lost (in this case due to adverse weather conditions)
• it’s night time (because it’s scarier)
• there’s a beastie on the loose, picking folks off one by one
• there’s tensions and infighting amongst the crew
• our heroes have to fight to stay alive, and figure a way out of their fishy predicament.

One of the things you notice about certain types of low budget movies is this insistent need to try and punch above their weight, or to put it another way, their reach always exceeds their grasp. The Rig is a prime example of a very low budget movie (around $3,000,000 apparently), that tries to tell a certain type of story that’s way beyond its means to actually do so effectively.

Good filmmaking can be done on a shoestring budget, and every now and again, movies do crop up that successfully work around severe budget limitations and the best of them turn lemons into lemonade by making those limitations work for the movie (think Evil Dead, or Blair Witch). In fact, there are movies out there that really deliver genuine thrills, whose budgets are smaller, much smaller. It all depends on what you’re trying to do. The Rig unfortunately tries to do far too much with not nearly enough raw material. This is a doomed approach.

The best thing the movie has going for it is the shooting location i.e. it would seem that much if not all of the rig based action was shot on location on a real drilling platform of some sort. This gives a priceless grit and reality to things, but the flip-side is that even though the many aerial shots of the platform seem to indicate that it’s pretty vast and labyrinthine, the action/drama never seems to really tap in to that effectively, and always feels small and contained. Someone always seems to be running down the same corridor. Maybe the filmmakers only had access to limited areas of the shooting location, who knows. This ‘smallness’ is not exploited in a good way either, it’s not a tight, claustrophobic feeling movie, just… restricted.

OK, so I think you know where this is going. I’m not the type to enjoy relentlessly slagging a movie off, but I’m having trouble thinking of anything else good to say about it, as I’ve already mentioned the plus side of the location filming. Christ if this movie had been shot on sets, it would probably look like mid 1980s Doctor Who without the good writing and amazing special effects (joke intended).

You have been watching….

With the exception of the slightly inexplicable presence of US TV regular Art LaFleur kind of bookending the movie, plus an overweight and half asleep William Forsythe playing bad tempered old rig captain ‘Jim’ (do drilling rigs have captains, or is it ‘skippers’?), and Serah D’Laine as his daughter (is it Carey? Maybe Kerry?), the rest of the cast are instantly forgettable, and the characters completely ‘2D’. We aren’t really introduced to any of them in a way that makes their names implant in the brain either. I was most of the way through the movie when I realised I actually didn’t know any of the characters names except for some dude called Earl (who was the first crewman to buy some fish-monster action, and therefore dead anyway), and that’s only because, once the rest of the crew are ‘searching the whole ship’ for him (but not looking in the one place they knew he was going to when they last saw him), they call out his name a lot.

I was going to say that Forsythe rather phones in his performance here, but as he also joins Earl and gets himself fish-monstered early in the movie (no doubt so he can nip off to the bank with his cheque for turning up); his performance is not so much phoned in, as scribbled on a Post-It note and stuck on the fridge.

The strangely familiar (except, brief and not much fun) Armageddon style dynamic going on between Jim and his daughter (Cathy? Or is it Kiri?), who’s also a crew-member (and sheboinking one of the roughneck guys) seems forced and unconvincing. Forsythe and D’Laine never seem like father and daughter together. Rather, Forsythe looks like he’s enjoying the kisses and cuddles a little too much if you see what I mean? Ahem! Moving on, naturally Jim doesn’t approve of (Casey’s? Kierra’s?) relationship (no-one’s good enough for his little girl of course). Although at least he doesn’t start chasing the dude round the rig with a shotgun, Harry Stamper stylee. To be fair, he hasn’t got time before he’s a goner.

As for the rest of them, they can’t seem to muster much in the way of appeal or appropriate emoting, and the dialogue is distinctly clunky and uninspiring. Part of me wants to cut the actors some slack because the writing’s not so great, but some of them (particularly the younger brother character who also bookends the movie with LaFleur) are really pretty terrible.

Oh dear, it’s very difficult this. I’m not a happy bunny when I have to do a review where I can’t seem to find the good. But it has to be said that The Rig is not doing itself many favours. My initial positivity (some would say woefully misguided positivity), has taken quite a bashing.

It seems that the thing lacking here more than anything else (except budget and acting chops), is someone at the helm who really knows how to put a movie together. Anyone who’s ever watched alternative endings, extended scenes or even whole alternative cuts of a movie in their DVD extras, can attest to the fact that more often than not, the alternative/extended scene doesn’t really work, or it may work within itself, but not when cut into the rest of the movie. There’s always a very very good reason why a well edited film makes its cuts where it makes them, and when it’s done badly, the whole movie just feels awkward and out of rhythm. Decisions about what to leave on the cutting room floor (so to speak), and how to effectively construct a scene, or a flow of scenes, are the stuff of great talent and artistry. The editor’s role in working with the director to really create the movie is more crucial than I think most would give it credit for. Case in point: The Rig suffers from a few too many bad editing decisions, unsettling continuity and poor structuring. Couple this with the variable acting chops of the cast, lazy storytelling, plot holes, contrivances, etc. and you get a movie that isn’t as good to watch as it potentially could have been, even allowing for the threadbare concept.

Director Peter Atencio serves up a movie devoid of intensity or suspense (ok so maybe there are a moment or two early on), and misses the mark in so many key areas that I’m starting to lose the will to even try and explain. While watching the movie, I had my MacBook poised, and I began making notes; tippy tapping away whenever something merited a mention. What I ended up with once the end credits were rolling, was mainly a list a mile long of everything that I felt didn’t work about the movie, made no sense or was contrived in order to achieve a result. This wasn’t my intention. I felt terrible, but I was merely honestly reacting to what I was seeing.

Here are just a few, merely for the sake of making a point:

• Ok, so when the first dude (Earl) gets splatted (leaving a big bloody splash across a view window), and is being looked for by the others, it doesn’t seem to occur to any of them (particularly the other dude he was actually working with moments before) to retrace his steps, and go to the control room where he had been headed. Why ‘search this whole ship’ and not at least make a bee-line for the one place they knew he had been going to?
• When they finally do make it into the little control room where Earl got sliced and diced, no-one notices the big blood smear that presumably (unless the creature is in the habit of mopping up after itself) would still be all over the window.
• Why, when the second comms officer comes back and sees ‘something black and scaly’ dragging his colleague’s bloodied lifeless body out of the far door, doesn’t he raise the alarm immediately? Instead, the scene cuts to the rest of the crew going about their business, and never cuts back. It sort of fucks with the natural cadence that the movie should employ at this point. Instead we have a number of reasonably lengthy scenes (including the aforementioned Armageddon heart to heart between Jim and his daughter (Corey? Coco? Cleo?), that seem to convey a reasonable passage of time before we finally return to the comms officer. In fact, the monster nobbles big Jim as well before we finally (and I do mean finally), discover the comms officer again. We find that he had done a runner and (ineffectually) barricaded himself in to his quarters (and not raised any alarm of course – silly boy).
• Once big Jim’s been killed, the crew are finally on high alert and tool up. But, this is a working rig right? Surely they must at least have some slightly formidable looking tools that could be used as weapons? I mean, one guy grabs a lamp!
• When the cook becomes a fish supper, he has his back to the phone on the wall. He’s unaware of the situation and the rest of crew are trying to call to tell him to get the hell out of Dodge, but he doesn’t answer of course. Why? Because this phone only flashes a red light to let you know it’s ringing, making no kind of audible hailing tones – Why?! – Couldn’t they have just had poor Cookie wearing his iPod? Why contrive a silent phone!?
• It’s a sea creature right? Almost no exposition is proffered about the creatures, so we spend the entire movie knowing zero about them. What are they supposed to be (yes there’s more than one)? Who knows, we’re never given any insight, except that we discover they’re flammable (handy).
• We must assume then that we’re dealing with non-sentient animal beings, acting on instinct. This means that surely a locked, steel pressure door should be a pretty insurmountable obstacle to one of these fishy dudes right? Yet, many times throughout the movie, the creature seems to be able to come and go as it pleases, wherever we happen to be. This seems to indicate that the little buggers are either intelligent enough to work out how to open pressure doors, or all of the doors are constantly left, not only unlocked, but ajar too.
• Once LaFleur and the young guy arrive back on the rig and discover the still extant monster, LaFleur dispatches the beastie with a makeshift weapon that one of the other characters made earlier. The flaws here are immense, and involve niggles like: Where exactly did LaFleur find the weapon? Why would he think to ignite the end of it (only the guy who made it, who’s now dead, had discovered that the monster was flammable)?
• Finally, if the surviving creature is still there on the rig come morning when LaFleur and the young brother arrive on the platform (which it is), why does the young dude find his older brother lying in plain sight, still alive and unconscious? Why hasn’t the monster killed him? And for the same reasons (death by fishy monster), why was Carey (see I remembered her name finally), just sitting out in the open waiting for the helicopter? Surely, the shock, trauma and fight or flight instinct would dictate that even if she thought the creature/s had been killed, she would hole up somewhere safe, and stay there until help arrived. Not sit out by the helipad. Strange!

OK, so I could go on, but I need to wrap this up here.

In summation, The Rig can’t deliver on its promise. The budget is too small, the scope too big, the cast too wooden, the ideas too thin, and the execution too slapdash. You have to wonder, with so many odds stacked against it, who amongst the production team actually thought it would be anything other than what it is?

And I didn’t even get around to really mentioning the fishy creature design… best not then, as I don’t want to be responsible for the movie deciding ‘enough is enough’ and wandering off into the woods to shoot itself.

Ben Pegley