Hell, or Tidewater (2020)

(On TV, October 2020) There’s a blend of terrible and wonderful in Hell, or Tidewater that makes me want to tell anyone to watch the film even though it’s almost unwatchable. Produced with a high-school play production values yet tackling a heady blend of geopolitical intrigue and Canadian issues such as pipelines, Arctic Circle exploitation, gigantic submarines and First Nations rights, it’s certainly a film that aims for much more than it can deliver. I cannot adequately describe the amateurishness of the production: It’s a repulsive blend of bargain-basement CGI, threadbare sets, terrible actors, incompetent direction, amazingly unconvincing staging and awful dialogue. This is a film where the footage shows a small river and has characters tell us about the amazing underground submarine base underneath. It’s a film with cute but terrible actresses, with dialogue that spells out acronyms (and there are many acronyms), with set decoration that have no relationship with anything we can imagine as appropriate for the script. The shots don’t match; the submarine CGI is worse than most kids’ shows—I could go on, but you get the point: you have probably never seen a film as terribly made as this one. Even the premise of using submarines to transport energy is so dumb that it defies explanation. And I’m barely scratching at the insanity of the other building blocks of the plot. And yet, and yet… I found myself occasionally charmed by the film’s intentions and its willingness to include techno-thriller action along big social issues. It clearly wears its First Nations sensibilities on its sleeves, and it goes for broke in attempting a story that would be far better served by a novel than a movie made on anything less than a hundred-million-dollar budget. It’s so fiercely Canadian that it openly frowns at Americans and has us winning one over grotesquely caricatural Russians. I strongly suspect that my begrudging but real affection for the result does owe something to a bad habit of mine: the tendency to listen to movies while I’m doing something else (usually, ahem, writing movie reviews) rather than focus intently on the screen. I strongly suspect that I would have tapped out had I been stuck doing nothing but watching the screen. Listening to the film, however, takes most of the film’s heave-inducing visuals out of the equation, leaving only the premise, plot, dialogue, technical details and flat line reading as the irritants. I don’t necessarily recommend this way of digesting a film to anyone else (it takes practice to listen to a movie and know when to look up at the screen), but in rare cases it may actually improve the experience. Still, I don’t want to beat up on an ambitious Canadian production too much—it bothers me quite a bit that I cannot find any single other review of Hell, or Tidewater on the web at this moment, and so this one may pop up as any kind of defining assessment.