The Rig (2010, dir:
Peter Atencio; cast:
William Forsythe, Stacey Hinnen, Sarah D'Laine, Marcus T.
Paulk, Carmen Perez, Daniel Benson, Robert Zachar, Scott
Martin)
The Rig is a weird mix of genres and styles.
It can be described as
Alien meets Soap Opera on a Reality TV show.
* On one level, it's a standard monster movie. A creature beneath
the ocean floor is disturbed by oil drilling. It emerges from
underground, climbs aboard the oil rig ... and the body count
mounts!
As a monster movie, it's what you'd expect. A disparate group of
oil rig workers, skulking about dimly-lit steel corridors, seeking
a monster, which picks off the workers, one-by-one.
But there are some odd aspects to this film.
* Too many soap opera elements.
We have two brothers, one older, one younger. They bicker, because
the younger one is lost in the older one's shadow. He leaves the
oil rig, so he can forge his own identity on another rig.
Meanwhile, the rig's supervisor is father to one of the women on
the rig. She has a lover, another oil rig worker. But Dad wants
his daughter to do something more meaningful with her life than
being an oil rig worker.
"I wanted something better for you!" he laments.
"I'm not mom!" she retorts.
"I know," he saddens.
They both gaze sadly at a photo of Mom.
Dad is extra hard on his daughter's lover. When
the monster kills the lover's co-worker, Dad gives a long speech
about responsibility to the lover.
"Don't you think you were too hard on him?" the daughter later
complains, during a lengthy father-daughter dialog.
Then the monster kills Dad. The daughter sees the blood in Dad's
office. Tears well in her eyes. She later suffers flashbacks of
their father-daughter times together.
Meanwhile, two other crew members are having an affair. When the
monster kills the woman, her lover screams at the man who was with
her. "You didn't protect her!" He then beats up this co-worker.
I guess it's nice that these characters are fleshed-out. But
The
Rig goes overboard with it. And it's not like the characters are
all that unique. Their conflicts are clichéd, their dialog is trite
-- the sort one finds in soap operas.
It feels weird, having all these soapish spats and arguments amid
the creature attacks.
* Then there's the classical music. Very artsy. But a strange
choice for a monster movie.
When a man is killed, his death is depicted in slow motion, to a
violin accompaniment. Later, another man rushes through the
hallways, to a classical piano score.
Monster movie scenes in slow motion, to classical music
accompaniment? Was the filmmaker trying to create a horror-art
film? But the monster is so stupid, the usual rubber-suited beast.
* Then there are the reality TV stylistics. So many shaky-cam
shots, and jump-cut editing.
An on-shore boss tells the younger brother that he cannot return
to the rig, on which his older brother might be dead. Then several
jump-cuts of the younger brother outside the office, slamming his
fists against equipment in frustration. The scene feels as if a reality
TV show
producer is following these people with his camera.
This occasional reality TV show camerawork and editing clashes
with the occasional artsy classical music. Much like the soap opera
pathos clashes with the rubber suit monster.
Just what kind of film is
The
Rig supposed to be? It's
aesthetically all over the map, now this, now that.
Some other observations.
* It takes too long for the killings to start. Weakens the horror.
* We see very little of the monster. Weakens the horror.
* It's never explained why the monster drags off his victims,
instead of leaving them dead on the spot. In
Alien, it was to
impregnate them with her young, but no reason is given in
The
Rig.
And the victims are dragged off to somewhere seemingly arbitrary.
No place special, really.
* Some elements are directly lifted from
Alien. There's a
"Sigourney Weaver moment" -- when the sole survivor woman presses
herself fearfully against a metal wall -- the creature lurking on
the other side!
* There are some nice surprises.
A comedic/wimpy black guy warns one oil rig worker not to follow
the noise, but to run the other way. Normally, good advice. (He's like the wise black maid who quit her job when
the demon started manifesting itself in
Mausoleum.) But then
the black guy is jumped by the creature -- which was behind the noise.
(Apparently, the noise wasn't the creature). Nice surprise.
The
Rig is an okay horror film. Entertaining, but only just.
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