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I am not a "movie" person. I am a movie review person, and spend too much spare time at rottentomatoes.com, but I do not and have never gone to the flicks on a regular basis. When I do, it is because a very special movie "event" has drawn me in (LOTR: Return of the King) or because I am on the verge of losing my mind (The Alamo. No, really. And it wasn't that bad.).

I suppose Spiderman 2, which I saw in its opening week, falls in that first category. Good film, that, but that's a blog for another day, maybe. No, among the interminable trailers preceding the feature was a clip for something called Open Water, about a couple o' yuppies who get left behind during a scuba trip and encounter sharks, jellyfish and whatnot. It claimed to be based on a true story, and I did vaguely remember hearing of a left-behind couple in Australia some years back, but mostly the trailer was a lot of screaming and thrashing around.

I recall saying to Jon that I didn't understand what point there was to even making a movie like this. Either the couple is triumphantly rescued after all that screaming ("Susan? Susan?!? SUSANNN!!!!"), which is cheap, or one or both of them become fish food, which may be realistic (it sure happened to the real-life couple) but doesn't seem to fulfill the qualifications for a classic, cathartic tragedy. Either yuppies get lost, get freaked, and come home safe, or yuppies get lost and die. That second one may look tempting on paper, but a) you need a good script for it and b) the picture obviously wanted the audience to identify with the yuppies, not laugh cruelly at them.

It may sound like I'm cheap-shotting the film, given that I only saw the teaser trailer, but trailers give away so much these days that I felt secure in saying that this was a movie that probably didn't need to be made. Even in that clip, I saw too much shrill panic, too many close calls, to find a happy ending believable or satisfying, and I didn't want to see a snuff film with real sharks either. I hoped most people wouldn't go for that.

Well, the tomato-meter's data says otherwise, but even after reading positive reviews, I am not much swayed. Particularly since I cheated and read about the ending. While Ebert makes a powerful case for why the film would pack a wallop in an insightful viewer who recognizes the delusion of self-importance that gets most of us through the day, Slate's Edlestein sums up in the spoiler'd second tier of his review the problem I had with the very idea of Open Water: either you go for the cheap thrills followed by a cheaper rescue, or you sketch out a pair of marginally sympathetic characters, force the audience to identify with them just because, and obliterate them without the mitigation of allegory, symbolism, or even much in the way of a story.

Morally, I can applaud this decison on the part of the filmmakers, and if Open Water has the same profound effect on normal viewers that it did on Ebert, Edelstein, and some others who were unsettled not by the sharks, but what the film said about existence, then I suppose it deserved to be made after all. I still don't want to go see it.