The first month of every year may start with resolutions about self-improvement, working out more, sleeping more, eating better and the like, and yet the new offerings at the movie cineplexes are more reliably junky than any other time of year. Underwater is peak January movie; a bungled poof of a plot, shoddy direction, feckless characters, unimpressive production work. It’s movie empty carbs, devoid of any nutritional value or artistic takeaway. The kind of movie you can throw in the pile with the other countless shameless impressions of Alien (alongside 2017’s super lame Life) that fundamentally misunderstands what makes that movie oh-so-great.

Underwater begins in a rush with a brush. A toothbrush to be precise. Kristen Stewart’s Norah, a bleached and shorn mechanical engineer, muses about how 6.5 miles down on a deep-water drill site, you lose track of time. Norah scrubs at her incisors and spies a monster in her midst: a spider in the sink. She relocates (rather than smooshes) the daddy long legs occupying her spit zone, giving us the faintest hint of some kind of tenderness, the closet the movie will get to characterization in its 95-minute runtime. Before Norah’s even hit that two-minute dentist-recommended scrub time, the vessel she’s housed in begins to shake, rattle, and roll, imploding around her and killing all crew without marque appeal.

The rest of the movie is a quarter-baked escape from the depths thriller, the screenplay from Brian Duffield (Insurgent) and Adam Cozad (The Legend of Tarzan) failing to give life to any of their characters. The cast that includes Vincent Cassel, John Gallagher Jr. Jessica Henwick and T.J. Miller are given shockingly little to do and even less to say/feel, stuffed in air-tight space suits and told to shriek every now and then when real monsters begin to wreak havoc on their survival odds. The screenwriting duo ostensibly tries to make the movie about more than a far-flung crew killed off one at a time but any attempt to hone onto an actual intelligible theme ends up being mostly laughable. In theory, Underwater is about time; having it, losing it, not being able to keep track of it, but any attempt to airbrush the film with deeper meaning and human relationship comes across as brazen lip-service to anyone wanting half a brain in their deepwater actioner. It just doesn’t work.

Without a coherent purpose, no trace of actual character work, and no discernible storyboard, Underwater is little more than a bland uninspired redux of familiar territory shot on the fly with a harebrained script. Director William Eubank is clearly interested in cosmic ideas of the great unknown; his debut film Love follows an astronaut cut off from the world isolated on a space station circling Earth with his sophomore film, The Signal, revolving around a group of human friends who end up captured and studied by extraterrestrial beings. Eubank again tries to tap into a kind of Lovecraftian terror, this time borrowing directly from the creator’s signature aesthetics to mixed results. When a deep-sea Chutlu-type creature rears its monstrous head, Underwater finally takes on a sense of scale and impact that’s otherwise entirely absent but it’s too little too late. A drop of Evian in a pond of wastewater.

The problem remains: there’s so little to latch onto from a thematic, character, or plot perspective that even the bits and bobs that are semi-cogent still remain out to sea. From the off-to-the-races starting gun beginning forward, it feels as if entire scenes are missing from the movie. So too is the editing messy as hell, building tension with claustrophobic tasks and then just fast-forwarding to a resolution. Characters often seem to disappear from one location and randomly show up at another, the folks in the editing both evidently throwing up their hands at making the movement of this thing legible in any way. The fact that the direction can be confusing when it’s not downright amateurish doesn’t help. It’s almost like the camerawork and cinematography draw inspiration from snorkeling in a rainstorm. Muddled and unintelligible, it’s hard to tell what’s what and who’s who, which becomes terribly problematic when things get hectic and it becomes increasingly more and more impossible to parse what exactly is happening and to whom.

If only there were some genuinely thrilling set-pieces or scary beats then Underwater might just justify the price of admission but nothing resembling even a slight elevation of pulse can be found amongst the wreckage. Save perhaps from Eubank’s horned up indulgence in stripping his female cast members down to their undies, for this movie has no shortage of K-Stew dashing under the sea as scantily clad as any seashell-cupped mermaid.

CONCLUSION: Perfect for fans who love both bad sci-fi rip-offs and TJ Miller comedy, Underwater is often a spectacularly incoherent mess you can’t help but snicker at. 20,000 leagues below the best iteration of these kinds of movies, the latest Kristen Stewart vehicle is simply out to sea in all the wrong ways.