I know there was a thread on this before. It just hit general release here.
I saw it yesterday. Anybody else? What did you think?
Absolutely the worst movie I have ever seen.
AGREE…without a doubt the worst movie I have ever seen also. Not exaggerating
I liked it, my wife hated it. Worth seeing for the scene in the hotel room. It isn’t a flashy movie, no special effects, just a very creepy, realistic movie. The one peeve I have is when movies are ‘based on true events’ when there is obviously no way to know what happened (ala Perfect Storm).
Kinda good, kinda bad.
Kinda good - low budget 70s porn quality, independent, “sci-fi-ish” thinking
Kinda bad - It was NOT what they are advertising!!! Had really NOTHING to do with the actual story, nor did it really have anything to do with scuba or sharks. Just a boring, psuedo mind-screwing 1 hour flick…
Here’s the real story…
Imagine if the movie actually used this info…would have made a pretty cool 3 hour documentary…
In 1998, Tom and Eileen Lonergan disappeared off the Great Barrier Reef after a diving company accidentally left them behind in shark-infested waters. Their bodies were never found. David Fickling reports on the true story behind a disturbing new film…
The sun is bright and hot as you break surface. You squint to see the
outline of a boat. After 40 minutes of scuba diving you feel disoriented. You paddle round to see whether the boat is behind you, but there is nothing: just calm, blue ocean, stretching to the horizon. Such is the scenario of Open Water, the surprise hit of this year’s Sundance film festival, which has also met with rave reviews across the American movie press. Shot on handheld digital cameras with a shoestring budget, it depicts the disintegration of a happy Americancouple after they are abandoned in shark-infested seas off the Bahamas during a dive holiday.
Tom and Eileen Lonergan
The promotional material boasts that the film is “based on true events”, but its makers are now parrying questions about exactly which true events are involved. Yet few doubt that the inspiration is the case of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, American tourists who disappeared off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef on January 25, 1998. The couple had wound up in Australia after several years of travelling round the world. They had met and married at Louisiana State University, where Eileen had taken up scuba diving and persuaded Tom to join in her hobby. For two years they had taught for the Peace Corps in the Pacific island country of Tuvalu, before spending a further year in Fiji.
They were planning to travel round the world before heading home, but first the couple were determined to visit the Barrier Reef. In Port Douglas, an upmarket diving and sailing town towards the end of the road north through Queensland, they decided to take a day trip on a 26-passenger boat, the Outer Edge. For A$160, the five crew would take them for three dives on the ribbon reefs, a stack of broad shoals that run along the seaward ramparts of the Barrier Reef, 40 miles offshore. On their third dive, round about 3pm, they headed off together and were last spotted swimming calmly 12m down. When they came to the surface after less than an hour underwater, the Outer Edge had gone.
Being left behind on a dive is not an instant death sentence. Paul Lucas, a tourist from Leicester with less than 10 dives under his belt, survived for 40 hours in stormy seas in January 2000, after he was left behind by a dive boat in northern New South Wales. A diver is wearing an inflatable lifejacket and has the air to inflate it in a tank strapped to their back. The danger in the blazing heat of tropical Queensland is that, without fresh water, someone floating in the middle of the ocean may dehydrate long before help can marrive.
The day after the incident the Outer Edge brought another tour party to the area, and one diver found six dive weights resting on the bottom. Oblivious to what had happened the previous day, a crew member described the find as a bonus.
At that point Tom and Eileen might still have been alive just a few miles away, using the empty dive belt to bind themselves together. They certainly appear to have survived the night: several months later a fisherman 100 miles north of the site found a dive slate which records their thoughts as dawn broke that morning. In a wobbly scrawl faded by months in the water, Tom Lonergan had written: “nday Jan 26; 1998 08am. To anyone can help us: We have been abandoned on Acourt Reef by MV Outer Edge 25 Jan 98 3pm. Please help us to rescue us before we die. Help!!!”
Other clues offered tantalising glimpses of what might have happened. A wetsuit of Eileen’s size washed up in north Queensland in early February; scientists measuring the speed of barnacle growth on its zip estimated that it was lost on January 26. Tears in the material around the buttocks and armpit had apparently been caused by coral.
Inflatable dive jackets marked with Tom and Eileen’s names were later washed ashore north of Port Douglas, along with their tanks - still buoyed up by a few remnants of air - and one of Eileen’s fins. None showed any signs of the damage you would expect from a violent end, suggesting that the couple were not the victim of a shark attack, as the film suggests.
Experts at the inquest speculated that, drifting helplessly back and forth on the tides in the building heat of the tropical sun, the couple may have been driven delirious by dehydration and have voluntarily struggled out of their cumbersome outfits. Without the buoyancy provided by their dive jackets and wetsuits, they would not have been able to tread water for long.
Publicity surrounding the case spelled disaster for the Queensland dive industry. Nearly 50,000 people work in Queensland’s Barrier Reef tourist trade, which is worth A$4.3bn and hosts nearly 4m day trips every year. High-profile horror stories could irrevocably taint the image of local operators. Worse still, this had not been simply an unavoidable accident. Dive boat crews are meant to count every diver into and out of the water and then carry out a further count when the boat leaves the dive site, but somehow the Lonergans had slipped through the net.
Outer Edge skipper Jack Nairn said that he had ordered a crew member to carry out the count, and that the numbers had become confused because two passengers had jumped into the water halfway through. In any case, no one seems to have noticed that two sets of diving gear were missing as the boat steamed back to Port Douglas, nor was any alarm raised the following day when the Outer Edge returned to the same spot. It was only two days later, when Nairn found a bag containing the Lonergans’ wallet and passports on the boat, that the alarm was raised. By that time, Tom and Eileen would probably already have died.
The industry’s damage-control mechanism was desperate and unpleasant. Rumours started spreading - many of them put about by the Outer Edge’s owner, Tom Colrain - that there was more to the Lonergans’ case than met the eye. Melancholy passages in the diaries of Tom and Eileen were raised as evidence that they had committed suicide, that he had killed her in a murder-suicide, even that they had faked their own deaths and sped off to a new life in another boat supposedly spotted nearby. Sightings of the Lonergans began pouring in from all over Australia.
In the inquest and subsequent trial of Jack Nairn on manslaughter charges, the speculation reached fever pitch. “The defence attorney used these diaries to absolutely slander, to absolutely destroy these two people’s reputations,” says Eileen’s father, John Hains, who travelled to Cairns for the hearing. “I was disappointed in the verdict . I felt like the jury didn’t believe that they were dead, and to me that was the essence of the trial, was to prove that they had died.”
Six years on, the names of Tom and Eileen Lonergan are still those most likely to shut down a Cairns conversation, so the release and publicity surrounding Open Wateris far from welcome. Jack Nairn still lives in the area despite losing his business as a result of the publicity and debts surrounding his trial. He initially refused to talk
about the case, and would only discuss how the fallout from the case had affected him. “The reality of it is that the thing creates emotional turmoil for all of the people involved,” he says. “It’s incredibly unsettling and stressful for myself and my children, and for us it’s a terrible thing that has been made. This is really very bad for the industry as a whole.”
Nairn’s concerns about the impact of the film on tourism are not surprising, given the Queensland dive industry’s struggle to rebuild its squeaky-clean image in the wake of the Lonergans’ deaths. In a check on 59 dive shops by Queensland health and
safety inspectors in 2002, a total of 76 notices were issued for failure to do proper head counts, dive logs or lookouts - the main issues highlighted three years earlier in the Lonergan inquest.
Hains has no truck with the release of Open Water. “As far as the movie’s concerned we’re not interested. We won’t see it,” he says. Yet remarkably, he holds no grudge against the crew and passengers on the Outer Edge. “I don’t have any hard feelings against anybody, because it was an accident,” he says. His only disappointment is that amongall the equipment washed up on the shores of north Queensland, there was never a trace of his daughter’s body. "It leaves a big hole in you to lose your kid, that’s part of your life. I wish they had found them, so we had something. I suppose we have the Great Barrier Reef.
They’re part of that."
How was the movie worth seeing for the hotel scene? She’s laying there naked (really nice body, maybe worth it) and her husband gets a little frisky and she says she is not in the mood. What the hell was that about? A good sex scene could upgraded the movie from the ‘worst’ movie to the ‘almost worst’ movie I have ever scene. If I want to see great nude bodies I will just go through the hottie thread again and again and again.
Tom,
The minute I saw the story line in the newspaper I knew I had to see it. I wasn’t disappointed.
I’m surprised that several people who I recommended it to had no desire to see it because they thought it was to scary.
The knife was a good point of theatrical tension now wasn’t it.
I thought the movie was great. Now if you want to talk about the worst, then lets talk about the Sheryl Crow concert at Taj Mahal in Atlantic City on Aug 14th. Now that was the worst! No kidding!
feel good move of the year.
can’t say i “enjoyed” it, but i typically measure movies by how they affect me … this one scores extremely high in that regard … utterly terrifying and horribly realistic. there are moments when the couple is arguing about who’s fault it is that rang incredibly true. all in all a devestating movie.
Worst movie ever - The Postman by Kevin Costner. It was like a train wreck - kept getting more and more horriffic!
Worst movie, League of Extraordinary Genltmen. Looked like they used up all their dough on one invisible man scene and then just went with white makeup the rest of the film.
Movies about people and sharks are movies you won’t get me to see.
The hotel scene, while nothing particularly special with its nudity, was probably the highlight of the movie for me for its dialog. I don’t have the exact dialog, but it’s more less something like:
Him: “Are you in the mood?”
Her: “Nope. Not tonight. Not in the mood. We could talk?”
Him: “NOPE! I’m feeling tired too all of the sudden. Goodnight.”
Classic. 
If you want to see a pretty good thriller – I recommend “Collateral” with Tom Cruise and Jamie Fox. The scene with Jamie Fox with the drug king ranks right up there in the “shy, unassuming guy gets inspiration in the face of certain death and turns into a serious bad ass” category.
Here’s a question for you sprinter experts – did the director crank up the film speed when he shows Tom Cruise sprinting? If not, Tom Cruise is a damn good sprinter, especially for his age. Good form. Of course, if I was being paid upteem million dollars, I’d run pretty damn fast too.
On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best, I give it a good, solid 6+. Most of that for the ingenuity and insight in adopting what has become an enormous “urban legend”, although these incidents have obviously happened.
Not super great film making, but good. If it were a college film project i would have given it an A+.
I liked it. The friend I went with didn’t. It is fairly simple, and the acting & script is alright and goes where you’d expect it. Was it “scary”? no. Did it give me the heebie-geebies, yeah. It made me think twice about letting a boat leave me stranded in the middle of the ocean.
I did catch “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring” the other day, a Korean movie about a boy growing up with a buddhist monk; very little dialogue but absolutely beautiful and relaxing…
i had forgotten one of the worst movies ever made until i watched it again the other night, showgirls. how did it ever get made? if it didn’t have large amounts of nudity no one would have ever seen it.
Where did you get that info? That is interesting.
Worst movie, Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman couldn’t even save that oine.
Being the cyclical anal triathlete that I am…I had to have closure and did some research.
Here the link, although it isn’t working. I’m assuming their server has been too busy + too controversial of topic.
In reply to
Kinda good - low budget 70s porn quality
Your scaring me dude !