I just want to say here, what I said in the other Open Water thread:


I watched Open Water tonight on DVD, and then I came here to this thread. I read every single post in this thread, and I was getting ready to say the exact same thing as you DVD Smurf, but then right as I was about finished with reading all of the posts, I see that you have already said it, heh. Very odd, but I'm happy that I'm not alone.

Here are a few random thoughts from me:

-How someone can say that Blanchard Ryan is fat, or whatever, really confuses me. She has what I like to call "an absolute perfect ideal body". It's fine if you don't find her attractive, but to call her, and women like her, FAT, is simply f'd up.

-While the acting, camera work, etc... in the film was lacking, I thought it fit this picture. I may be wrong, but what this film looks like to me is something that went out there, and purposely did much of what everyone is hating on, on purpose. The camera work to me looks like it is as it is simply to make it seem more real, something like a documentary shoot. The acting seems a bit off because instead of wanting to look like "acting", it's going more for a real feel, how people might really act and talk.

-The scene during the storm at night is one of the all time greatest, most perfect, most outstanding examples of tension, fear, and everything else of the sort that I've ever seen in my life. As I watched this in the room with all of the lights off, with the volume turned way up, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I can't remember the last time that a film, A FILM, caused me to actually break out into a cold sweat because I was feeling so much tension from a scene.

-The ending is perfection, I couldn't have thought of anything better to add there at the end. As Susan went under the water, and the surface joined together leaving only the waves, it was as if her tomb, as well as Daniel's, had been sealed. It was as if the solid stone tablet had been placed over them both, sealing their respective fates. The shot of them both just fading away, disappearing, leaving nothing but the water and their remaining belongings said more to me than most films do over a period of two hours.

-After Susan lets go of Daniel, and allows him to float away and then sink, the shots of the sharks under the water was just, well, I don't really know how to put it. It was chilling, heartbreaking, and just so much more. You see the top of the water, the camera goes under but not totally, so you don't see anything. It goes back up, then goes under a bit more, and that continues for a while. Then finally it goes back up, then under just enough so you can see just how many sharks are involved now.

Wow.

Like I said, to me it was a documentary, a very chilling, telling, emotional trip through one of the worst nightmares of all time.

Blachard Ryan isn't fat. That really shouldn't even be debatable either. This was a nice little suspense movie, it's just that critics who saw it at Sundance in January of 2004 hadn't been seeing hype about it for months and months like most of us.

There was never that much hype for months and months for this thing. EW maybe had an article or two in their magazine about a month before release but that's it. The Blair Witch Project was infinitely more hyped, and in the end a better movie than this student film.

Funny thing is that I rented both last night. Open Water was first and I liked it quite a bit. Very tense, and I honestly can't for the life of me figure out what people here are bitching about, either with the storyline or the acting. Both were fine....it was a solid film: 3/4 stars.

KA sucked major ass. All I could think the whole time was that I could be watching Excalibur

I have to disagree, BWP got about the same amount of pre-hype. The website generated most of that. It was all the post-first weekend hype/word of mouth that got it off the ground. That was why it did so well from word of mouth, it caught people off guard b/c they hadn't been overwhelmed with trailers for it before it came out.

For what it's worth, I thought it was a great movie, one of the best I've seen in a long time. It's a thinking man's movie, what would you do in a similar situation? What else could you do?

I also like the feel of the movie, shot with a digital video camera it just has a different feel to it.

For what it's worth, people do get stranded in the ocean. My sister was scuba diving in Mexico about ten years ago on a nice, calm, sunny day. While underwater a storm came upon them suddenly and the guy on the boat called them up, and they left. Well, on another boat in the same region, apparently the guy on the boat decided to go scuba diving also because the weather was so nice, the storm came and destroyed the boat, the divers died.

What suprised me was that Blanchard Ryan is 37 years old, I thought she was in her mid 20s.

Yes! Great movie btw. I have to disagree with most as I thought the acting was pretty good throughout.

You've summarized my feelings as well. It had a pseudo-documentary/home video feel to it. It felt very "in the moment". In addition to the "I forgot my mask" A-hole on the boat, I would have liked to have them have an ariel shot where the camera would have panned up to show how much open water and distance there was from anything. While the opening scenes where they are leaving their busy lives behind could have provided more character development, I found the acting to be be fine on whole. Plus, I gotta give the actors a lot of credit for being in the water around those sharks.