Gods of the Deep – 2023

Gods of the Deep is an Alien clone of sorts in a specially constructed submarine for extreme depths. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it right away on the covert art, but Gods of the Deep is clearly a Lovecraftian tale. The whole thing just screams about ancient Gods and from what you’ll see it’s almost impossible not to think of Cthulhu. But that’s not all it is. I think it’s actually a blend of many stories and movies.

We have Alien of course. A team is sent out to get a sample of something unknown on the sea floor. The entire team doesn’t know what they’re after of course, but a selected few knows exactly what they’re looking for. And despite the dangers they are hell-bent on bringing a sample home. There’s money to be made from this sample. Lots of money. Doesn’t sound too far from Alien right? I think that in Alien there was a military aspect of it as well, they wanted to use the embryo to weaponize it. That’s not really the case here.

Lovecraftian

The Lovecraftian part of it is that one of the passengers of the submarine seems to know exactly what they’re looking for and when they encounter it he almost praise them as his Gods. That leads me to believe that the Gods of the Deep are actually the Ancient ones that HP Lovecraft so often wrote about in his stories. That whole mythology is a very interesting one. Which, I must admit, that I know too little about. It would be very interesting to study that further and to actually get some consensus about that. The mythology I mean.

There are, as it’s underwater, some parts of the Abyss in the movie. There are scenes that I’m sure were inspired by that movie. But on the other hand, those scenes are really so generic that they could take place in any film where water and near drowning occur. Maybe it’s just the fact that most of the movie takes place way down under the surface that tricks me.

Low Budget

At first, I thought it was just another low-budget monster movie. I thought the opening scenes were very poorly filmed. But then I realized a couple of things. First off, this is not a Hollywood blockbuster, it’s actually a British film. Brits do movies a little differently from Americans. It’s not as glossy if you know what I mean. I would cak Gods of the Deep Kitchen Sink Realism but it’s somewhere in that direction if you know what I mean. It’s not so much action and the set is often more realistic. Not necessarily the case here though. Since I found that many of the scenes in the first few minutes of the movie seem to have been filmed in locations that were easy to come by. Such as already abandoned places to keep the cost down.

Believable

But then, when they go on board the sub, it’s completely different. It may not be expensive sets but they work and they are believable. I can really see that this takes place on a real futuristic submarine designed for the specific purpose of going down to those extreme depths. One thing that bothers me though, is that they claim in the movie that no one has been down to this depth before. I may not have been paying attention but I always thought that the Mariana Trench was the lowest place on earth and that was visited by humans already in the 60s. This movie takes place in the Antarctic.

But all in all, I thought it was an entertaining movie. There are lots of dynamics in it even if the general plot is very thin. I like the way the Ancients of the Gods of the Deep were portrayed. It will be a race against time. A race against the enormous pressure that the water will generate on the sub-hull. There will be greed along the way and some of the crew will choose to do the right thing whilst others might sacrifice all for the glory.