“Breaking Surface” – My review….2 videos and much more!

After a really long time of waiting for this movie, I was finally able to see it last Thursday.

I could have seen it already but I wanted a full HD picture and a language I can actually understand.

The german blu-ray has the original language on it (Swedish) and a german language option of course. You can switch on german subtitles as well.

I watched the movie in german once and watched the underwater scenes again a day later with original Swedish audio and German subtitles.

The movie has a runtime of 82 minutes. At least 40(!) minutes of that is placed underwater! You won’t find many movies that can offer that….especially with female divers.

And it’s pretty unique because there are actually no sharks or other creatures in it like in the horror flicks (examples: “47 meters down” and “47 meters down – Uncaged”).

It’s a survival movie. Two sisters fight to survive a really bad situation underwater.

Ida (Moa Gammel)

Tuva (Madeleine Martin)

Also, after 9 minutes in….you won’t find a single man in the whole rest of the movie! As far I can remember that happens only in one other movie I have in my movie collection: “The Descent”, where 6 women explore a cave system and encounter some monsters there. I know quite a lot of movies with no women in them (mostly war movies) but the other way around is a rare thing.

The fact that there are over 40 minutes of underwater scenes in the movie is awesome but turns out to be kind of problematic for this post. I won’t show all of them of course. But which scenes should I present here?

Also I don’t wanna show scenes with major spoilers to the story here.

Today in this post I wanna present two scenes to motivate you to buy and watch this movie. More on that….later.

For now, let’s start with….

Scene 1!

Preview:

Checking the ship’s propellers…

…now the bow trusters…

Wanna guess what happens next? 😉

(click to enlarge)

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And here is the video:

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A nice peril scene for starters! Even it was pretty predictable….and hard to understand what the idiots on the bridge were doing as it was known that she was working down there.

A good idea of her to get rid of her tank to jam the propeller, as it was pretty much her only option besides waiting for those idiots to turn it off. But then it might have been too late….

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Scene 2

Tuva, the younger sister is trapped behind a rock at 32 meters depth! Her oxygen is gone and Ida hastily returns to her with a full tank…

Preview:

Her tank is totally empty….Tuva needs air quickly!!

Ida…

…has switched back to her full face dive mask

(click to enlarge)

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And here is the video:

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Great scenes! It’s no secret that I really like scuba peril scenes. And seeing both of them here in desperate need of air….is quite …well….sexy 😉

Also, the swapping with their full-face dive masks and their “normal” scuba masks is also interesting! I normally like full-face dive masks, but I must say this Ocean Reef mask with the fully transparent faceplate isn’t so attractive in comparison to other masks like the Interspiro mask that Tania Raymonde is using in Deep Blue Sea 3.

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Now back to the movie in general.

It has some flaws, no doubt. The scene above with Ida looking for that oxygen tank for example.

She is without air for around 130 seconds! She is not a professional diver like her little sister and isn’t a really good athlete or in great shape. I hardly doubt that she could hold her breath that long while being in such a stressful situation. Her sister is trapped, she is without air, searching for that oxygen tank in the darkness. She gets lost for a while and yet is pretty calm as she finally reaches Tuva again…

I would have shortened that scene. Let her dive without air for 60 seconds and then swim back on the brick of total panic. That would be more dramatic and more realistic in that case. Yes, there are apnoe divers that can go on much longer without air….but Ida isn’t one, she is highly stressed and not in a condition to stay without air that long.

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Another thing is that tank she is searching for. I checked the scenes several times and can’t explain where it is coming from. It appeared out of nowhere! Where did Ida get that from?

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Also, a big rock falls on Tuva. She is trapped under it but isn’t hurt at all!? I guess that is ….possible…but damn, a “little” hard to buy. But in the end, it has to be like that so that the story could develop like it does.

There are one or two other aspects but I don’t wanna sound too negative.

All in all it is a really good, thrilling movie! The desperate atmosphere is suspenseful and I tried to come up with solutions myself as Ida is trying to free her sister from down below! And as I said, more than 40 minutes of underwater scenes with women in one movie is pretty unique, especially without CGI sharks or other monsters.

Both actresses did a really good job and did most of the underwater scenes themselves after they both learned to scuba dive for the movie as I heard from an interview with the director (on the Blu-ray).

Ok, the drysuits aren’t exactly attractive, but well it’s Norway and not the Caribbean. Also, the darkness below at over 30 meters adds to the grim survival-fight-atmosphere. It wouldn’t work that well in a bright, beautiful setting like in the Bahamas for example.

Folks, I can only recommend this movie to you! This movie belongs in every collection of someone who likes survival movies OR scuba movies OR movies with female divers OR movies with scuba peril scenes.

So folks, ORDER this movie. BUY this movie!

Such movies must be supported, so other producers would make movies with scuba scenes too!

Scuba scenes are expensive, many producers are afraid of doing them.

This year there were two new movies with great scuba scenes…I hope that is a new trend!

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The German Blu-ray has some extras:

• Trailer (pretty useless as you see that before you watch the movie)
• an automated picture “show” with music (end credits song)
• an interview with the director (16 minutes, interesting!)

I had hoped for a “Behind the scenes” feature as well…but no luck.

Oddly enough I am sure I saw such a video floating around the web some months ago. It was rather short but interesting and showed the filming in a water tank.

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….so, this post is long enough now…

I will post more about this movie another time.

I have some story ideas of my own on this one. 😉

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Have you seen it already?

What do you think of it?

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